- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 08:21:19 -0700
- To: "Marti" <marti@agassa.com>, "Lisa Seeman" <seeman@netvision.net.il>, "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org>, "WAI" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
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