Whales, owls, and geezers

It's become a Rachel Carson/Ralph Nader kind of thing.

Maybe stopping the construction of a dam because it would make darter 
snails extinct strikes many of us as absurd but... About 40 years ago the 
Boeings were about to take the first steps in launching a fleet of 
supersonic airplanes (even named a basketball team after that undertaking!) 
but some "academic type" went before congress and said that he could prove 
to the satisfaction of his peers that a large fleet of such specifications 
would destroy the ozone layer and one of our main protections against 
radiation poisoning would go bye-bye. If he was wrong the consequences are 
that we still take 17 hours for some flights that might have taken 5 or so. 
If he was right and we went ahead with the shorter flights we'd all have 
cancer and be working hard to come up with a means of restoring the ozone 
layer (or live in caves).

In my beloved Pacific Northwest are bumper stickers: "save a logger's job, 
kill a spotted owl". One of the points is that owl protection is via 
protecting their habitat and it may be that the ramifications of this 
effort help maintain our oxygen supply, etc. Similar thing with whales 
which came close to extinction so that dog food stayed cheap and pianos 
could have "natural" whalebone instead of plastic covers on their keys 
(long since that "tickling the ivories" was a misnomer: there just aren't 
enough elephants to kill for real ivory keys).

OTOH geezers are in a strange position because everyone wants to live long 
(without of course "growing old") as in "I hope I'm as sharp as you when I 
get to be 75" but some of the accompanying conditions are glossed over. I'm 
fairly certain that I can read a certain line on the eye chart, without 
glasses, at a greater distance than 90% of the people on these lists, but 
unless I use really good lighting or a magnifier I can't read the usual 
phone book. Started noticing this about 45 years ago. So my message about 
these parts is: you're going to get old thanks to the "miracles of modern 
medicine" but it will have side effects that are/mimic *real* disabilities. 
So take this guideline stuff as seriously as do the people who hug trees to 
prevent their felling.

How, you might be asking does all this fulsome raving fit into the GL WG 
list? Well, the current brouhaha about text-as-image is about as good a 
place to draw a line in the sand as any other. My bottom line is: the W3C 
logos that might violate our principles ("erect no barrier 'twixt content 
and user") aren't even that great as design, at least in my opinion. 
They've got to go. This will be more in the vein of making a statement than 
about making some fairly trivial semantics available to people using 80x 
magnification.

Does anyone else think the statement is worth making - even in as 
simple/trivial an area as the logo of an organization that purports to 
speak for us geezers?

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Saturday, 21 October 2000 10:36:17 UTC