Re: General Exception for Essential Purpose

Ian,

To help me understand your point of view, would you say whether , for each 
of the cases I described, graphic text should be allowed and whether an 
alternative page is needed or not?  I repeat them below for convenience.

Here, "chilly font" is a font with icicles dripping from the letters, 
that's hard to read for people with low vision even with 
magnification.  However, it is not copyrighted, or part of a logo.

----

1. a site teaching kids to read, where the word "cold" is written in chilly 
font.
font ok?
alt page needed?

2. a schedule of public meetings of a township zoning board, where all the 
winter dates are written in chilly font.
font OK?
alt page needed?

3. an artistic page, with poems about winter, incorporating chilly font.
font OK?
alt page needed?

4. A hypothetical web site for a company "frosty cola".
- a splash screen with chilly font
font OK?
alt page needed?

- an employment listing with job listings in chilly font.
font ok?
alt page needed?

Should WCAG 1.0 say any to distinguish these cases?
Should WCAG 2.0 say any to distinguish these cases?

If so, what?

Len


At 01:51 PM 10/27/00 -0400, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>"Leonard R. Kasday" wrote:
> >
> > This is a proposal for a general guideline which will I think, help resolve
> > the image text issue, and other issues as well. Its a modification of WCAG
> > 1.0 checkpoint 11.4 on alternative pages.    It also needs to be added to
> > WCAG 2.0--I don't see an equivalent to 11.4 in 2.0.
> >
> > Here's straw wording of what I'll call the "essential purpose" guideline.
> >
> > <guideline>
> > If a web page's essential purpose prevents you from satisfying a
> > checkpoint, you can consider that checkpoint passed if the user can
> > conveniently access an alternative page on which the checkpoint is 
> satisfied.
> > </guideline>
>
>"Essential purpose" refer to author's intent. The Guidelines were
>designed based on user needs. The tension between the two is
>the source of many issues.
>
>In order for the author's intent to translate into content that
>is accessible to users with disabilities, you must have
>markup languages that allow authors to express their intent with
>content that can still be manipulated to meet user needs. You
>must also have user agent support for those markup languages.
>
>WCAG 1.0 was clearly designed to address user needs first
>and author intention second. I think that it may be best to
>leave it that way (even in clarifications), and that
>WCAG 2.0 focus more on the author.
>
>Users have requirements. Responsibilities to meet those requirements
>lie with specification writers, authors, and software developers.
>As Charles has pointed out, in an ideal world, it may be easy
>to divvy up responsibilities among those three camps. But in the
>real world, the challenge is to identify who must do what, who
>cannot do what, and what requirements may not be met by a given
>set of guidelines. I don't think WCAG 1.0 was designed to, or
>is flexible enough to, meet the needs of all users with disabilities.
>
>  - Ian
>
>--
>Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
>Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
>Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Friday, 27 October 2000 15:25:24 UTC