Proposal for guideline 1

I suggest that we make guideline 1 about providing equivalent content. In
particular:

that we do not restrict the requirement for synchronisation to particular
media. 1.2 and 1.3 could be combined to require that time-sensitive
equivalents are synchronised

3.7 - supplement text with multimedia - should be part of guideline 1. Text
is not, in my opinion, a magic format for all content. For animated musicals
it is often rather inferior, but where it is the only format that a user can
process it is a lot better than a simple denial of access.

some rationale...

Metadata used to associate or provide alternatives are not text. It may be
possible to produce text from them, but it is also possible to use it to link
images and audio, with never a word of text in between. There are cases where
doing this is important for a lot of people with disabilities.

The requirement for text as a special case tends to leave out people who are
used to reading non-text forms, either graphically presented information,
sign languages, and other methods.

charles

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000:
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 28 November 2000 11:55:16 UTC