- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 08:42:16 -0500 (EST)
- To: <gian@stanleymilford.com.au>
- cc: <goliver@accease.com>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Well, in your own work you should be avancing whatever is relevant information for your clients, and typically that would go beyond "pure accessibility". For WCAG, the requirement is that this helps people solve the problems that they encounter which are related to a disability. This doesn't normally include all the problems people encounter in life - there are bureaucracies taht are difficult to deal with for everyone, poorly designed systems that cause real problems for people with and without disabilities in equal measure, and things that are problems because someone has a disability. It is the last category of things that WCAG is designed to address. So an argument based purely on "people ca't afford to upgrade" isn't a sufficiently strong one. It needs to explain why people can't afford to upgrade, and what level of support people do have - do we need to cater for Netscape 1? For people using email-based access to the Web? (People are still doing this, for good reasons) Do we need to assumme that people have telnet-only browser access and need to work with very old browsers, or that they may have text-only systems, but have modern SSH and XML capable software? This is an open issue for WCAG, and one that won't go away on its own. cheers chaals On Mon, 18 Mar 2002 gian@stanleymilford.com.au wrote: With regards to below. If this argument holds true, then why can't Graham and I use the economic rationale to enforce backwards compatibility? Surely if a site doesn't work for someone because that someone can't afford the latest hardware/software/etc, then we would fail the making things work for people. > Graham > 3. It takes time for non-English (internationalised) > versions of software to be produced. > > Gian > I don't think this falls under our charter. > > Chaals > well, our charter requires us to make things work for people. > It doesn't say > "for people who speak english", and we would fail to get past > the i18n review > in last call if we don't recognise this. > > chaals > > > -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 08:42:20 UTC