- From: Matt May <mcmay@bestkungfu.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 09:00:25 -0700
- To: <apembert45@lycos.com>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert45@lycos.com> > Lisa didn't just find the illustrations "nice", she found they helped her more quickly and efficiently process the content. I think that is the point you are missing, tho I've no clue why. This is not just about making the web "nice", or even "more friendly", tho there are some checkpoints that do no more than that already (such as synchronizing scripts). MM Synchronized text (WCAG1 1.4, WCAG2 1.2) allows deaf users to receive pure audio content in multimedia presentations. Synchronized auditory descriptions (1.3 in both) allow blind users to receive pure visual content in multimedia. Both of these are more than "nice" and "friendly". > The definition of priorities is that, for P1 priority, it needs to be necessary for a substantial number of users. This is the case with graphics and multi-media. MM No, it isn't. Not in the same way alt text is necessary to blind users. Without alt text, 100% of blind users will fail to receive information from an image. The presence of alt text on an image makes access to data less than impossible. The same is not true of illustrations: 100% of the cognitively disabled will not fail to receive a document that's not illustrated. P1 compliance doesn't make every web page a utopian paradise for blind users, either. All it does is make it less than impossible for everyone to receive the ones and zeroes such that their computer can present it to them. (This bears repeating: the _computer_, or rather the physical human interface device, is the dropoff point for most of the checkpoints. How it gets from the HID of the user's choice into his or her brain is not something that's easy to quantify.) What is necessary is the use of _good_ illustration through graphics and multimedia, and what is "good" is extremely dependent on the content being presented, and -- I'll say it again -- the _people_ who are producing the content. The number of people who are capable of creating illustrations, audio, motion video, or interactivity is extremely small relative to those who can produce text or HTML, and the subset who can do multimedia in a way that complements the text is a small fraction of that. You can require multimedia all day long, but if they don't have the tools (which are expensive) and the skills (which take months to build and years to master), what we'll get is a web full of silly, irrelevant clip art someone tacked on because we (or a tool like Bobby) said it's "accessible." I want to see guidelines that can be easily followed without significant retooling by content providers, and rules that are proven to increase access to people with all disabilities, but _without_ reducing usability for the rest of the users of the web. Forcing illustration and multimedia without regard to who is providing it or what it's being used for as a P1 is not the way to improve accessibility or usability to the web as a whole. > I'm not sure how "fairly common" it is to browse with images turned off... On this list, some folks say they use the web that way, but in my life away from this list, NO ONE I KNOW uses the web that way! Just as I don't know anyone in real life who uses television without the screen on, or listens to anything but music on the radio.... Blind users browse without the help of images, and watch TV without their eyes. That's pretty common. There is also a measurable percentage of the web who browse without images using Lynx, or by manually turning their images off to save download speed. - m
Received on Friday, 11 May 2001 12:09:26 UTC