RE: My Action Item: Multiple interface guideline

As a usability geek, I have to raise my concerns about mandating
accessibility for applications that would provide quantifiably inferior
experiences for disabled users.

I work on a system which is complex and heavily interactive. The average
session on this site consists of perhaps 300-500 transactions within 30
minutes. In terms of user experience and usability, a much better-designed
system could be built for browsers for the blind or other enabling
technologies than could possibly be done using accessibility techniques on
the current site framework.

I think my organization would do a far greater service to its users by
designing what has been described (with accompanying imagery) as "separate
but equal" experiences. Using XSLT, for example, transformations on the
same codebase could present experiences optimized for certain browsers'
capabilities and limitations. In the context of this site, this kind of
design could mean the difference between a 30-minute session on a voice
browser and one that could last a couple of hours if it's merely HTML
painted up with accessible markup.

I would suggest that there is more than one way of making sites
accessible, and to require one and only one manner in which to make a site
accessible has the potential to do more harm than good to those users
relying on accessibility techniques in a number of situations.

Bringing that to this thread, as a corollary, I think that we would do the
web community as a whole a disservice by mandating universal compliance
with accessibility standards where there are alternatives that are as good
or better for accessibility-enabling technolgies. Which isn't to say that
I advocate inaccessible software -- quite the opposite -- but the fact
that there exists some gray area here suggests that WCAG could fail to
gain traction in the public sector by telling companies which technologies
not to use, not to mention stating in effect that there can be only one
way to retrofit sites for WCAG compliance.

----
matt

On Sat, 14 Oct 2000, William Loughborough wrote:

> At 05:52 PM 10/13/00 -0700, Cynthia Shelly wrote:
> >I expect this to be controversial, so I'll duck now
> 
> Describing universal design as "one size fits all" might be controversial. 
> It's not as if we were using anthropometry to decide chair dimensions but 
> "I'm not convinced that it should be a goal for each version to be broadly 
> accessible" somehow is somewhat fly-in-the-face to what at least one old 
> person thinks is our aim.
> 
> To show that there is a "version" that isn't "broadly accessible" that 
> wouldn't benefit all of us by being made so would actually be an 
> interesting exercise because it might find holes in our contentions. I 
> advocate that "broad accessibility" is where it's at. To encourage creation 
> of materials that doesn't qualify seems counter-productive.
> 
> --
> Love.
>                  ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
> 
>

Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 19:09:33 UTC