- From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@erols.com>
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 18:17:35 -0400
- To: "Matt May" <mcmay@bestkungfu.com>, <apembert45@lycos.com>, "Jonathan Chetwynd" <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, "Marja-Riitta Koivunen" <marja@w3.org>
Matt, Your little exercise wasn't "scientific", and in fact it doesn't even qualify as "research". There are billions of users of the web, all kinds of people in all walks of life. A study of 8 people out of billions isn't scientifically significant. Further, you didn't bother to compile a table of your results, but presented only "averages" for comparison. It's not possible to make any deductions based on incomplete data. And, the biggest problem in this piece of psuedo "science" is the blatant prejudice of the "researcher". It's just hard to take something serious as "research" when all it's doing is supporting a personal prejudice. Oh, I didn't see any similarity between the Tiffany site and Jonathon's sites. Anne At 09:58 AM 4/23/01 -0700, Matt May wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert45@lycos.com> >> Incidently, I have a difficult time with so much said and inferred that >sound and multi-media are mis-used on the web. It is distressing to see how >often something that displeases or doesn't appeal a person is judged >"mis-used". One man's useless is another man's essential. > >MM I didn't say multimedia displeased or didn't appeal to me. I said I've >run scientific tests which show that multimedia sites such as those >demonstrated by Jonathan are less usable than standard HTML-based web pages, >due to inconsistency, non-discoverability and distraction, and this is >consistent with other research in the field of web usability. It's not a >personal opinion. > >Multimedia sites are designed not to look or function like one another, >which turns the navigation process from something learned by repetition into >something that needs to be re-learned at every page. Additionally, sites >like these obscure information by not being searchable (the text inside is >not only invisible to screen readers and text browsers, it can't be parsed >by search engines either). Yes, they look nicer and some people prefer them >on subjective criteria, but nothing that's been suggested here leads to an >objective statement that multimedia treatments of all the pages on the web >aid the accessibility of the whole web. Much less how to make >non-educational or non-entertainment sites accessible in this manner. > >- >m > > Anne Pemberton apembert@erols.com http://www.erols.com/stevepem http://www.geocities.com/apembert45
Received on Monday, 23 April 2001 18:10:35 UTC