Re: Should we consider factors other than accessibility [was Textual Images vs. Styled Text

Please be careful not to take content from here out of context.

It is not our place to determine the requirements for implementation, or
policy. It is important that we specify the requirements for users, and it is
important that we make it clear that we do that.

I guess this is what Len meant by saying "if we don't provide how to use
things, someone else will, and we might not like it". That's quite true, I
don't like it if someone says "don't bother with this, it is too hard".

However, like the Human Rights Commission in Australia, I recognise that some
of the things that need to be done are too hard in particular cases, which
means that some people will be excluded, as the price of access being
provided to some people at all.

And I do not believe it is the role of the WAI or the W3C to make up your
mind for you on how important accessibility is. I think it is our role to
this group tell you how to make content accessible. I think it would also be
helpful if we were to provide more detailed information on the benefits of
particular checkpoints, and what the consequences are if they are not
followed. (If we can't explain that, then it is difficult to justify the
checkpoint, anyway.)

I do not consider that I am qualified to make those decisions on a general
basis, and I don't think this group is either. We need to rely on the people
involved in a articular case to use the guidelines we produce.

Some other examples: A school teacher produces a web based class, and relies
on the fact that the students are all using a given software set, and that
there are none who have difficulties using a mouse. If these assumptions are
true, then in Australian law there would be no basis for a complaint. The
teacher is not providing a public service, but a service to a particular
group of people. The service is available to anyone else, and as a
by-product. It is not accessible to certain people. That is a sad thing, but
I would rather that it was available to the people for whom it is intended
than not available at all.

A public site produced by the Australian government or by the W3C, is a
different question. In Australia the government is obliged, by law, without
recourse to the defense of unreasonable hardship, not to discriminate against
people by reason of their disability. That's my government, that I vote and
pay for. If the guidelines provided for exceptions on the basis that
something was considered an undue hardship for "web designers", they would be
no use to the Australian government, who would then have to produce
guidelines that did not have such exceptions.

I note that the cut-down set of guidelines proposed by the US federal
government have not been considered by a number of US states, who have taken
a different approach. We may prefer one or another appraoch to
implementation, but it seems to me that basing those approaches on a complete
knowldege of the requirements for making content accessible is important, and
it seems to me we are the body chartered with the task of specifying that.

cheers

Charles



On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  At 5:11 PM -0500 11/29/00, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
  >It is not the remit of this group (or any W3C group) to determine what
  >particular people who have to design web pages for a living actually do.
  [...]
  >At the Web Accessibility Summit held in Australia recently, co-sponsored by
  >the W3C Australian Office, the Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights
  >(disability), Graham Innes, said that the Commission's view was simple: use
  >the WCAG guidelines.

  Do you think it would be acceptable for someone to openly claim that
  WCAG (1.0, 2.0, whatever) should _not_ be used in this matter, as
  a set of guidelines for web accessibility?

  In other words, would there be any great uproar from the crowd if I
  were to publish an open letter stating "Web Designer Should Not Use
  WCAG" and created a set of checkpoints which include a subset of
  "practical" guidelines instead of "accessibility definitions"?

  Would it be acceptable for me to publish this on the HTML Writers
  Guild site, on web designer websites, in articles and columns, in
  magazines and books?

  Because, by saying "we are not here to say what people should do, only
  to define accessibility," that's what we are asking for someone else
  to do.  Would you be fine with this splintering of the community
  based on the fact that WCAG is not meant as a usable resource but
  rather as a theoretical definition of accessibility?

  The example above, from the Commission -- "use the WCAG guidelines" --
  is clearly _not_ how a theoretical definition of accessibility is
  meant to be used.  Is WAI willing to actively work to prevent these
  types of misuse of the WCAG document, by people (such as the Commission)
  who misinterpret the Guidelines as a reasonable plan for making web
  sites more accessible?

  --Kynn




-- 
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 Wednesday, 29 November 2000 18:04:21 UTC