Re: Reapproaching WCAG 2.0

At 2:38 PM +0000 1/22/01, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>  > Unfortunately "useful discussion" requires presenting something real
>>  concrete to act upon. "X proposes, Y disposes" is relevant to this thing.
>
>To wit, I propose:-
>Fold guidelines 1 and 2 into 4, so that the two guidelines are
>"Interoperability", and "Comprehensibility".
>
>i.e. All people should get pages no matter what their disability, and
>understand them once they have them.

Sean, I would say that you can fold even further and state as one
guideline, 'all people should be able to use the Web'.  I think the
thing to remember is that when are dividing down sub-guidelines, we
are essentially drawing -arbitrary lines-, and when we do so, we
should draw those based on what best allows us to communicate our
intent to our audience.

This is where the "around 7" rule comes in handy; I'd say that less
than 7 guidelines (but around 7, so 4-6) with around 7 (or more,
say, 7 to 9) checkpoints each would be a good granularity scale.

Within that scale, it's just a matter of figuring out which arbitrary
splitting of hairs is most conducive to getting our point across.

I like Wendy's proposal -- what I've skimmed of it -- and I think is
about the right granularity to be well-structured and easy to
understand.  I think 2 guidelines isn't fine enough to be easily
understood.

(As an example of this principle, I think that 'give alt text for
everything' is too chunky, and 'give alt text for images' + 'give
long descs for complex images' + 'give captions for multimedia' +
'give transcripts for multimedia' is better, even though both
formations say basically the same thing -- modulo, of course, the
possibility that I forgot to list something. *grin*)

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 11:51:05 UTC