Re: Structure Again! (not again ;)

At 1:51 PM +0000 11/28/00, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>So, in summary WCAG are worthless dogmatic fascist rules imposed by an elite
>few...

In summary, they _can_ be.  There's a definite danger that we will
easily make ourselves ultimately meaningless in the larger scope of
things -- if we make guidelines which nobody will use, which only
meet our own self-defined goals, then nobody will incorporate them
into the web design process and accessibility will not be increased.

>I'm not even going to dignify that with a response other than "Kynn,
>what on earth are you doing in this group then? Are you trying to break down
>the walls of the elite few and get rid of this dogmatic fascism that you
>talk about?"

Every now and then I try, yes.  Have you read the archives?

>  > We were working towards trying to focus suggestions and comments by
>>  qualifying each one with a proposal. In other words instead of saying just
>>  "I do not like this" we add an alternative reversion or wording of a
>  > checkpoint, to qualify validate r feeling.
>Yes, and that's how the WCAG rules came about. Hardly fascist is it?

Depends on who is participating.  There is no representation in
this group of our target audiences -- the people who can make the
greatest changes in web accessibility -- and we are suffering for
lack of it.  For starters, we automatically dismiss the concerns and
needs of anyone who is not either (a) disabled, (b) entirely textually
oriented, or (c) highly technical and academic -- which means that
we produce pretty worthless guidelines which say "never use
graphics if they have any text, instead use SVG."

Such guidelines are laughably absurd to suggest to any real web
designer who has a huge number of issues to balance while doing
her job, from legacy browser support to varying CSS implementations;
from branding to usability; from deadlines to corporate requirements.

Because we have such an extreme focus _and_ such an extremely
focused, self-selected, specialized group, we have a serious
tendency to create guidelines which put accessibility at the
center of the universe and set unreasonable requirements which
may actually produce little or no actual increase in the number of
people who can access content on the web.

As Gregg has mentioned before, if people don't like our guidelines --
if they don't think WCAG 2.0 is worthwhile -- then they will make
their own.  We need to not only produce an "updated", and "more
complete" WCAG, but we need to create a "sellable" WCAG 2.0 with
obvious benefits over either creating their own guidelines or
simply sticking with WCAG 1.0.

And we can't do that if we decide (bizarrely) that our audience's
concerns are worthless and meaningless.

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

Received on Tuesday, 28 November 2000 10:49:18 UTC