RE: [320] Ability to be expressed in words

At 02:11 AM 2003-08-23, Tom Croucher wrote:
>I know this does not answer the question Kynn effectively posed of "What
>other alternatives can you give?" but maybe it posses a more poignant
>one, "What alternatives at all can we persuade content providers to
>give?"

It is true here, as Joe says, that we don't just need a better definition,
we need a better idea.  "Just do what is possible to express verbally" is an
unending assignment.  There has to be some other principle we can
bring to bear.  And there is.

The right goal for our effort, as Tom has suggested, is "what tip of the
information iceberg is most important to get articulated verbally, and
how can we get authors over the hump to articulate that?"

If we can communicate the right questions to the authors, they will be able
to articulate the answers.  Framing the questions is the key.  And then
follow-through.  Because gaps in the access infrastructure that the author
intended won't be obvious without aided inspection of the page.

The good news is that the theory for what to do is nearly there in the rest
of what we are already saying.  Summarize, decompose, orient, navigate.
Moreover, some practices to promote are already out there on the web in what
content providers are already doing.  We just need to refine our story to
get more content posted using more of the good practices.

The piece of this job that looks doable in the near term is to coach the
author through a bit of scene modeling and get them to articulate what is in
their scene, some principal properties of each such thing, and principal
relationships among these things.  Then we will be getting somewhere.

This will create a guide to their scene in an entity/relationship/attribute
graph with navigable relationships and speakable attributes.  It's up to the
format to create the marriage by which this gloss infiltrates or decorates
the scene the author has constructed by which to tell their story.  Once we
understand how to combine more- and less- critical information in the
computer representation, the whole plan is scalable to provide more or less
drill-down depth as the topic and the content developer's skills allow.

[The URCC primitives: "What's there?"  "What can I do?" are still the core
of what we have to lure out of authors.  Imagine yourself answering these
questions over the phone...]

Furthermore, there is a body of practice to pick up and extend, already out
there on the web, that will take away the worst of the problem and if
systematically applied across the web, leave a more universally usable state
of practice than what we have now.  This is how GIS information is served on
quote map sites unquote.

A GIS-like information base is usable enough in diverse enough modes of
access as to be considered a 'universal design' level of information
architecture.  I claim that "universally accessible GIS is readily
achievable," and "GIS-like" is a good working notion for a class of
information structures that the authors should be led to create (at least
for now).  Accessing these information structures takes the right sorts of
access methods, but these are systematically implementable in libraries and
pragmas and don't have to be re-invented graphic by graphic.

Web content developers can be led to an 'aha' experience saying "this is
more doable than it first looked" by reviewing how the information that is
conventionally considered "map information" is also served [on the
competitive map sites] through verbal dialogs as well.  As Tom reminds us,
this is critical to our success; perfect guidelines that fail in the EO
process are not doing any PWDs any good.

Talking about creating a GIS-like infiltration of the scene presented on the
web screen helps the content designer/developer think in graph terms and not
be forced to take the harder conceptual leap to a linear narrative.
Anything we do to lower the potential barrier to getting over the belief
that it's too hard is golden, is critical to our success.  Presented with a
tree-view presentation of the objects they have identified in their scene,
an author can readily from this view create a sensible tour, a linear
reading order.  Separating the questions of contents from order will make
the job more doable by real people in the content development activity.

Appropriate use of hierarchy in the scene description eases the dependency
on linear order.  This is especially important in the Tufte domain where the
information graphs are not gracefully projectable into a sequence.  Users
can, after all, follow non-linear graphs of navigable relations so long as
they are marked well enough with labels that evoke axes of relationship
that stick in the user's head.  The easiest way to do this of course is to
evoke patterns of relationship that are common in the users' life experience.
But there are lots of multidimensional tuples of axes that are common enough
experience so we don't have to wrestle every data space into an essay outline.

Al

For more, including links to resources, see

  Re: could you share your visualization links?
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wai-rd/2003Jul/0002.html

Plus:

What is it that you want the user to feel as well as know?
Put the analysis in
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-tech-comments/2001Aug/0001.html
together with the historical snapshot of the cited page available as
  http://web.archive.org/web/20010801160837/http://www.bankofamerica.com/accessiblebanking/


>On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 10:55 AM, Joe Clark wrote:
> >> WAI and WCAG WG peck away at picayune peripheral issues, tending to
>get
> >> even those wrong, and never quite twig to the fact that their central
> >> themes are even more wrong.
>
>
>On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 17:47, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> > "The current concept meets needs.  A replacement
> > must either meet those same needs, or somehow prove that those needs
> > don't really exist after all."
>
>
>As the newcomer to the WG I think I have some level of objectivity to
>whatever issues exist between Joe and the list.
>
>My take on what Joe is saying is this:
>
>If we try and force people to provide an alternative, which is
>"expressed in words", to complex non-text content we run the risk of
>alienating content providers from other more attainable goals which are
>perhaps more immediately useful.
>
>Being a fan of Tufte myself, and having some background in Information
>Architecture, I sympathise with the problems associated with displaying
>complex information (and often raw data) in a meaningful, or at least
>digestible, form. I would suggest that in their enthusiasm to provide
>the best possible accessibility standards the working group may be
>setting goals which are uneconomic or simply too difficult for content
>providers.
>
>As a web developer who advocates (as we all do) standards compliance it
>is plain that getting people to follow such standards as XHTML is
>difficult enough. If we then compare XHTML to WCAG; content providers
>are upset (not through any fault of ours) because accessibility, being a
>subset of usability, is not something one can just automate, it requires
>thought and human appraisals. As such it seems critical to the success
>of the WCAG, and hence the WAI, that the recommendations we purpose are
>achievable goals. Perhaps more importantly they should be perceived by
>content providers as achievable goals.
>
>I do openly admit that there are two levels of compliance in the current
>WCAG 2.0 draft, and I am keen for us to explore all options before we
>discount them. However if most content providers feel threatened by a
>recommendation that appears restrictive and is not open and shut (as
>XHTML is), overly zealous rules will only serve to further the view that
>standards of accessibility are unachievable.
>
>I know this does not answer the question Kynn effectively posed of "What
>other alternatives can you give?" but maybe it posses a more poignant
>one, "What alternatives at all can we persuade content providers to
>give?"
>
>
>Tom Croucher
>
>Co-founder Netalley Networks
>(http://www.netalleynetworks.com),
>BSc(Hons) Computing Student / Information Services Staff University of
>Sunderland
>(http://www.sunderland.ac.uk),
>Accessibility Co-ordinator Plone CMS
>(http://www.plone.org)

Received on Sunday, 24 August 2003 15:59:22 UTC