Site rating [was Re: Tone]

At 05:25 PM 9/27/01 -0400, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>what is a non-confrontational way to tell you how accessible the site 
>may/may not be?

This is another matter from what the original thread was about, which was 
dealing with the "attitude" expressed by the authors' choices in 
content/presentation.

The process for telling how accessible (or in fact how "anything") a site 
is might be done by a combination of the users' preference settings in 
conjunction with metadata concerning content. PICS tries to do this but was 
seen as a "political hot potato" since it seemed threatening to some 
critics' first amendment rights and evoked a "big brother" impression.

One use of metadata is to provide information about content including its 
accessibility. This would enable all this to be handled by machines whose 
settings were controlled by the user but whose data would likely come 
mainly from input by the author - which to date is spotty, at best.

This is cited in guideline 13.2 of WCAG 1.0 but goes largely ignored, even 
by those of us who tout it - another case for a "dog food patrol". I can't 
really find it in 2.0 and the techniques are, put kindly, vague. HTML has a 
"profile" element that should serve for this but there's probably no 
implementation therefor.

This inaction on what is part of a very important matter (both for 
Accessibility and the Semantic Web) should be troubling and is the basis of 
my current sig line.

--
Love.
EACH UN-INDEXED/ANNOTATED WEB POSTING WE MAKE IS TESTAMENT TO OUR HYPOCRISY

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2001 18:24:04 UTC