Re: Attack on Macromedia's Support for Accessibility

At 06:32 PM 12/1/00 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>disagree with this guy's [Joe Clark author of subject "attack"] general 
>premise:

Joe Clark's "general premise" is that he's convinced that MacroMedia is 
playing the game of "talk the talk without walking the walk" by sort-of 
saying all the right things, but actually doing nothing effective about the 
problem. MicroSoft revisited.

Rob Burgess [MacroMedia CEO]:: we've now got extensions developed in 
Dreamweaver to allow people to develop for and test your Web site's access 
for disabled people... The Web's for everybody...Flash can be used for good 
or evil"

JC:: "He may indeed have come to believe that, albeit belatedly. Macromedia 
is arriving at the accessibility party unfashionably late. Now, I go back 
over 20 years in accessibility."

If Joe were prominent on any of our Working Groups he would find me joining 
Kynn in asking him to cool it so as not to scare away our intended audience 
- potential allies of accessibility goals.

As he is independent of those ties (so far as I know) I can only judge his 
message on its merits - the proof of MacroMedia's intentions will be in a 
bunch of puddings.

Pudding A: their statements about accessibility, mostly stemming from the 
above Burgess policy quotes and their press release: 
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/

Pudding B: their hosting/sponsorship of two days of WAI Face2Face meetings 
(starting Monday) in D.C. (Evaluation/Repair and Protocols/Formats).

Pudding C: their participation in Authoring Tools meetings in Amsterdam and 
subsequent teleconferences.

Pudding D: whatever results ensue from digesting the other puddings.

Actually most of the points Joe Clark makes are via reasonably amusing 
diatribes about designers (he wouldn't honor them as "authors") who use or 
depend on Flash. "Young guys, with little life experience, impressed with 
the way-cool designs they can create...Hotshot Web designer d00dz...young 
guys with a preference for high-colour, chop-socky imagery suitable for 
video games...hopeless to expect these lads to go out of their way to 
program alternate readable and audible text analogues of the martial-arts 
movie they've created in Flash for their "bleeding-edge" client. They just 
aren't that mature." Unlike of course, Joe and we wise elders who share his 
mistrust of the still-young.

JC:: "The excesses of Flash are shameful, and the excesses are due largely 
to these hotshot boy-wonder programmer d00dz who have spent the last three 
years soiling the swimming pool. This will entail teaching visualist 
designers to write - a formidable task, through no fault of the designers' 
own; if writing were their true means of expression, they wouldn't be 
designers."

There's more but you get the idea. Joe is actually rather pessimistic about 
a literate world going to Hell in the handbasket of "Flashness". 
Incidentally similar concerns are raised about potential abuses available 
in W3C's somewhat similar technology, SVG.

In case anybody's read this far (or hyperlinked to the source from Kynn's 
post) what I think is that there is a history of the sort of thing Joe 
worries about and there's: no need to worry about his rant damaging 
MacroMedia or WAI; it's refreshing to be part of a medium in which such 
invective is permitted/available/widespread/amusing; I hope the corporate 
intentions are sincere and will prove effective.

Oh, and that the pool isn't *too* soiled by the "designer d00dz".

--
Love.

                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Saturday, 2 December 2000 09:16:57 UTC