Re: 4.1

Unfortunately I still feel that whilst we are in agreement on some 
aspects of a verbal or textual exposition of what is required, very 
little effort is being put into equivalence. Theatre, music, poetry and 
oratory have a very ancient heritage, one the web is not finding easy to 
emulate.

When a piece of text produces a coherent audio output, that is 
wonderful. however we are a long way from producing multi-media 
equivalence, mechanically. Until that remote time, this means both 
creating dramatic, pictorial, photographic and or symbolic 
representations of complex concepts; and identifying where possible 
generalizations that can be incorporated into guidelines*.

It is essential that at this early stage we extract what is do-able.
There is no sense in defining this as the task though.

However, it is also necessary to plot a route to the far more remote, 
and this is what I feel has been avoided over the past 4 years.
Part of this plotting, requires dead-reckoning, being prepared to fail, 
and attempting the apparently impossible, ie in the case of w3/wai a 
graphical representation of some aspects of the guidelines.
Fortunately, if the ecmascript techniques document is developed, this 
will almost certainly produce some graphical examples.

It also seems to me that the whole of Guideline 4.-Comprehension leaves 
far too much  responsibility in the hands of authors.
Users are in a far better position to qualify acceptibility, and should 
be involved in the process. if members of a family enjoy the online 
family album, surely that is a better guide than the authors+w3 
guidelines. We only can try our best but users ultimately are our guide, 
and this needs to be made explicit.

thanks

jonathan

I do have to say that as usual, I have not spent as much time as I would 
like actually studying the available reources at w3c/wai


*Merely stating that some people prefer one format is not that helpful.

Received on Monday, 10 June 2002 04:26:01 UTC