Re: Kynn's Reply: Textual Images vs. Styled Text

Well put William.

In other words, WCAG does not say what web designers or owners have to do.

It only says what's accessible.   That's what the definitions of Priority 
1, 2, 3 are.  Difficulty of making something accessible may be relevant 
when people decide if they are going to make it accessible, but it isn't 
relevant to the question of whether is accessible or not.

It's similar to UL approval.  Underwriters Laboratories doesn't decree that 
all lamps be UL approved.  They just say what's safe.  This severely limits 
the aesthetic freedom of lamp designers (e.g. thick, ugly 
rubber/plastic/cotton insulation instead of shiny, thin, bare metal 
wires).  But lamp companies are perfectly free to offer lamps that aren't 
UL approved.  It's just that it limits their market, especially where 
customers decide that safety is more important than some particular 
asethetic; and they find lamps designed by other designers with the 
creativity to make lamps both attractive and safe.

Len


At 12:11 PM 11/28/00 -0800, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 02:29 PM 11/28/00 -0500, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>>3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists
>
>In addition to "for example" and "avoid" you have to consider what 
>"exists" means.
>
>The dada POV which sort of says "nothing *means* anything" might be an 
>appropriate medium for recent exchanges but the letter/spirit/intent of 
>the checkpoint is reasonably clear. Actually I think this has been asked 
>and answered several times. There *exists* a means of doing this (other 
>than having a sighted person read it to you, which isn't really an 
>"appropriate markup language" although I'm beginning to wonder <g>) 
>therefore the site in question is in violation.
>
>I don't think anyone doubts this very much. There is contention about 
>whether this is too strong in view of the problems that authors encounter 
>when they examine how their stuff looks in all the myriad of various 
>levels of CSS support + the requirement to consider older browsers, etc. 
>But as some lyric asks "What's Love Got to Do With It?" - even in the 
>situation you describe where there's some regulation requiring conformance 
>it isn't unheard of for them to ignore it or find a way around it ("undue 
>burden" comes to mind). In the U.S. the supposed "promise of Section 508" 
>is tempered by the fact that a very similar rule (same number) has been on 
>the books and completely ignored for about 15 years.
>
>The use of image text is against the rules WCAG 1.0, the laws of the State 
>of Pennsylvania, and probably Oz and Canada and possibly Portugal.
>
>One of the "needs" of the Web site designers who toil to make the presence 
>of your state "attractive" and "accessible" is that there's no LAW that 
>they have to conform to some standard of "branding" but there is one that 
>they have to conform to the guidelines. If they resist this on the basis 
>that they don't think it "looks good" then we, as Fascist dictators will 
>see to it that their artistic sensibilities are violated and they'll just 
>have to work around these archaic notions that prevent them from doing 
>their most attractive work.
>
>It's not required by the state that the site has to look the same on every 
>conceivable platform, but that it "transform gracefully" - I just don't 
>understand where the aesthetics will get their wrists slapped? What is the 
>objection to making it work for more people.
>
>--
>Love.
>                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
>

--
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 Tuesday, 28 November 2000 16:08:23 UTC