Re: user-friendly

At 2:54 AM -0700 10/27/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>William submits that if this criterion is applied to WCAG 1.0 then 
>that document can be determined either to have met/failed that test. 
>If it meets it (depending on what "attentive", "should", 
>"understand", and "limited" mean), and I think it probably does, we 
>are being exercised over nothing. The complaints we received about 
>it's opacity (would our test subject know what that *really* means?) 
>were from people who didn't meet the definition of "an attentive 
>reader".

I have to beg to differ here.  I have talked with numerous people who
have found WCAG 1.0 to be very hard to understand.  Many of these have
been students in my HWG D201 course.  Now, granted, they seem to understand
it now, but at risk of sounding boastful, I maintain much of that is a
result of the teaching techniques developed to compensate for the writing
quality of WCAG 1.0 and cannot be attributed to WCAG 1.0 itself.

>I will, with Jason resist any attempt to dilute the necessarily 
>precise wording of the checkpoints/guidelines themselves.

I think this is a straw man; I think you are unnecessarily fearful
of something which nobody has proposed, and which is unlikely to
happen.  I believe it is possible to write clearly for our audiences
without "diluting" the message.
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Friday, 27 October 2000 14:29:49 UTC