Re: General Exception for Essential Purpose

At 5:16 PM -0400 10/27/00, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>You're saying the 2.0 philosophy is:
>
>A page can do absolutely anything, images of text, all sorts of 
>animations, uncaptioned audio, required mouse operation,  etc if 
>they make sure that there's alternative page that strictly follows 
>standards, with no exceptions, and provided
>a) the user knows the alternatives that
>are available b) the user can get there [into an interaction mode that works
>for them] and c) it is all kept synchronously up to date.

I'm not sure if this is _entirely_ correct; it's certainly not how
I'd phrase it, at least.

You lost my preferred phrasing on the second word -- "page."  I
think we need to remember that these are web CONTENT accessibility
guidelines and need to be applied to the content not to the page.

As such the content must be made accessible to everyone but any
specific page may or may not be usable by any specific user.

The idea of "an alternative page that strictly follows standards,
no exceptions" is also not the way I would phrase it.  I believe that
a system such as this must provide access to as many people as
possible -- and not exclude any identifiable groups based on
disability -- and part of that solution is to provide a "fallback"
version which is considered universally accessible.  However, I
don't feel that the "fallback" site is required to be _maximally_
accessible, but rather _minimally accessible_.

In WCAG 1.0 terms, the "fallback" needs to be Single-A, while the
other presentations can provide, _for the specific user profiles
used_, the equivalent of Triple-A accessibility for that person
only.

>I'm still uncomfortable because it's so darn difficult to verify 
>that the alternative site is equivalent and up to date.  Especially 
>if its dynamically generated.  it's tough enough to verify acessible 
>pages at all and this adds an additional complication.  For example, 
>you can't put corresponding pieces of original and alternative page 
>together for comparison.

Actually, with any decent system of this type, the "up to date"
part is trivial.  Any dynamically generated system as described which
is _not_ "up to date" will be a self-evident piece of crap which
nobody should use! :)

Harder to discern is the "equivalent" -- that is a matter of the
interface designers making sure that they are providing a FULL
alternate user experience, given the limitations of the medium.

There are some cases in which a system like this would NOT want
to generate a verifiably full alternate experience with direct one-to-
one mapping of all content.  For example, 3 use cases:  XHTML,
HTML + screenreader, and WML for WAP phones.  You go to a news
site.  The XHTML (default) experience may be a graphical display
with headlines, banners, etc.  The screenreader version may be
modified with structure, but should still contain the same content
(including accessible versions of the ads!).  The WML version may
only contain the summary of each story.  This is because of WML
medium limitations -- restricted bandwidth, restricted display,
restricted memory, restricted processing power.

You are never going to want to read War and Peace on your cell
phone, but you most definitely would want it on your graphical
browser or your screenreader!  (Actually, I would go nuts trying
to read it on either of those two as well, but hopefully the point
is made.)

>Anyway, thanks for explaining the new philosphy.  If anyone doesn't 
>think that's the new philosopy please hollar before I relax too 
>much...

I think we haven't explained the "new philosophy" well enough, and I
think your restatement of it is basically the old philosophy's
look at the new philosophy. :)  It's still cast in terms of the
WCAG 1.0 approach.

I see this as an expansion of the WCAG 1.0 philosophy; as a natural
outgrowth to take into account new technologies which have emerged
and will continue to emerge.  I have a financial interest in this
as well, of course, as this "expanded philosophy" pretty much
describes the Edapta technical game plan as well as business
advantage. :)

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Saturday, 28 October 2000 03:54:33 UTC