Re: Illustrating Guidelines

At 05:53 AM 5/13/01 -0400, Marti wrote:
>Did you know that a curb cut makes it hard for many blind people to find 
>the curb edge so they can line up...properly?

While this is true its inapplicability as an analogy is due to the fact 
that all proposals for guideline elements carry with them a means of 
modificability/refusability - they are not cast in concrete. Also you can 
find a little bit about how the curbcut ramp problem was seen by a blind 
guy who participated in these issues early on as well as the problems you 
cite could have been solved by proper implementation.
http://ubats.org/jeff.htm

Recommending multimedia (which we essentially already do) might need more 
prominence? In particular what we have the opportunity to do is to make our 
document be a self-reflexive example of dancing the dance we sing about in 
our song. One entry in the "Illustrating Guidelines" thread emphasized the 
importance for some people of the need to make a local decision as to what 
was the divisor between "enhancement" and "distraction". I'm lucky enough 
to be able to say that although I get the New York Times via the Web every 
day and it is bordered at its top and right side by supposedly attractive 
(distracting?) banner ads I couldn't tell you what they advertise if you 
put a gun to my head. There are techno means for stripping them for those 
who cannot, e.g. read the New Yorker magazine without attending to the 
advertising therein.

I believe this spikes any argument that "what adds accessibility for some, 
reduces it for others". We might call for assertions (as in EARL) for what 
certain omissions/containments are based on as in "the prerequisites for 
accessing this textbook on thermodynamics is some knowledge of what 
'thermodynamics' means" or "there are no animated graphics on this site" or 
"this site is usable by anyone with a 'grade-3' reading level (whatever 
that means!)."

Any legacy sites will certainly be "grandfathered" in by whatever 
regulators take a part in all this, so that isn't really a concern.

We cannot pretend that either in what the guidelines say, or in how they 
say it, that: multimedia is anything less than the norm of the Web; that 
our guidelines are exempt from their own provisions.

It is regularly pointed out in this reasonably civil (though tediously 
interminable) thread that there is already language present in the 
guidelines/checkpoints themselves to cover most of what we're saying - it's 
just that the guidelines don't follow their own recommendations!

DUH!

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Sunday, 13 May 2001 11:19:47 UTC