- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 08:38:48 -0700
- To: "Charles F. Munat" <chas@munat.com>, "WAI Guidelines WG" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
At 5:30 AM -0700 2001/8/20, Charles F. Munat wrote: >Also, I'd like to see a lot more focus on comprehension. And I >have some questions, such as, How do we measure success? Part of the danger here is that we are going to always be behind on the comprehension checkpoints for a variety of reasons: (1) We've been working on access for blind people for years now; in fact, our checkpoints relating to access by people who can't see are pretty much unchanged since prior to the WAI's creation, modulo some refinement and changes in technological specs (such as HTML 4.01). On the other hand, the comprehension issue has only recently been addressed; there is not the huge amount of content and research available within the body of knowledge considered "web accessibility". (2) As the audiences who could benefit the most from accessibility techniques to make text most accessible would -- by definition -- have difficulty in participating in a mailing list of this sort, we have no "self-advocacy" the way that someone such as Gregory Rosmaita can directly articulate his own needs as a person who is unable to see. This makes us dependent on "advocates" in way that we not been before. (3) It is harder for most people -- especially those of us in this group who tend to be overwhelmingly brilliant (as well as passionate) -- to visualize cognitive disabilities. Close your eyes, cover your ears, don't move your hands, and you can approximate -- and thus personalize -- the challenges faced by specific disability groups. (This technique, while limited, is still highly useful as I've found in my online class.) You can't do that with cognitive disabilities; it's hard to imagine "not reading well" or "not understanding". Thus we can't rely on our own intuition. So what's my point? It may be unreasonable for us to expect that in WCAG 2.0, we address issues of access for all disability groups equally well. It may not be a good expectation that we'll have as comprehensive a set of techniques to make content more understandable as we to do make content available to people who cannot see. We may have to say "this is the first version which strongly addresses these needs, and future releases may do better." --Kynn -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com> Technical Developer Liaison Reef North America Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network Tel +1 949-567-7006 ________________________________________ BUSINESS IS DYNAMIC. TAKE CONTROL. ________________________________________ http://www.reef.com
Received on Monday, 20 August 2001 11:58:33 UTC