Re: WCAG In Haiku; From William's Terse Version; Hope These Are Helpful

> Naturally then good presentation does help comprehension.

Of course. The divisions between the verses are in fact arbitrary, because
they support one another.

> Revealing the structure, clarifying and emphasizing, and
> breaking information into manageable chunks, illustrations,
> outlines and indexes is also connected.

Yep. The problem with the Haikus is that even though they are terse,
they're still a good example of why hierarchies simply don't work. Perhaps
I should jumble them up, and get rid of the titles/divisions? What, in your
opinion, would be more memorable? I'm sure that people can remember the
"PICT" (Presentation, Interaction, Comprehension, and Technology) ontology.

Perhaps I can think of a more intuitive way of organizing it...

> [...] Different users may use the different levels of explanations in
> different manners.

Yep, and that's really the point: conformance to WCAG is not the primary
goal, the primary goal is to get people thinking about accessibility.
Sometimes, even downright rediculous accessibility statements (e.g. expand
absolutely every acronym) are good, because they get people to say, "well
hang on a minute, I don't agree with that", and surely that's better than
just following the guidelines because you're forced to?

And then we sometimes seem to forget what a rich myriad of data the Web is.
There's no way that all of it could be accessible, but what's more
interesting is that not all of it *should* be accessible. Should university
dissertations be written with an "8 y/o" reading level? What WCAG should
provide is a) some hints to get people thinking about accessibility, and b)
as many tools as we can possibly provide to get them thinking about it. One
person "getting" what alt attributes do is probably worth 5000 pointless
acronym expansions. There are many people who simply do not know what
function alt attributes perform, and if they did, then they'd use them.

I think William put it best:-

[[[
Katie can see to it that the U.S. Government continues to respect their
"508 ladies" and similar actions will occur all over the world.
Legislators/administrators don't care from 1.x or 2.0! We can all write
individual "guides to the guidelines" and pool the royalties for a really
big party.
]]] - [1]

Cheers,

[1] From: "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>
To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>; <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 10:30 PM
Subject: Re: WCAG In Haiku; From William's Terse Version; Hope These Are
Helpful

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 18:19:16 UTC