User agent capabilities [was Agenda

Another user agent issue I face is that it depends on the user group.

For example, if a business or agency provides its employess with user 
agents having certain capabilities, it doesn't have to worry about older 
user agents, for pages only used by those employees.   In other words, we 
can assume more for intranet pages than for internet pages.  (I'm dealing 
with this as we speak BTW).

I think this is yet another argument for having a document (or section of a 
document) that deals only with accessibility as a function of user agent, 
and omits "requirements" or "compliance".

Requirements for compliance should be in a different document (or document 
section), which takes into account the user population (e.g. public vs. 
employee) and factors against which there may be a tradeoff with 
accessibility (e.g. "essential purpose" ).

I think this will save time in the long run, since we'll otherwise have 
perpetual arguments due to different people having different situations in 
mind.

Len
--
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 Thursday, 7 December 2000 15:23:53 UTC