- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 10:58:57 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Maurizio Boscarol <maurizio@usabile.it>
- Cc: Jens Meiert <jens.meiert@erde3.com>, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Where you might be wrong is if you are prepared to do something that works fine for one group of people now, at the expense of others whose problems you don't recognise, or at the expense of developing better tools in the future that serve people better. As an example, consider the idea of navigating through several layers of a complex HTML site to a page by skipping through the link text or by skipping through the heading structure of each page. WCAG contains checkpoints designed to assist both. For a long time people were unable to navigate by headings in the most popular tools (Internet Explorer, Netscape), although in others such as Opera it was available many years ago, providing a useful functionality tyo keyboard users. Instead, people would navigate by moving through lists of links. This practical reality meant that things like an extra link saying "skip to something" would be added at various places in a page. Watching blind JAWS users give demos in teh late 90's it was horribly obvious that for them it was very difficult to get an overview of the page content because they had no mechanism for understanding the heading structure. Yet the absence of this in tools was long offered as a reason why it didn't matter if the validation of headings made sense, whereas getting link text perfect was considered important. (Now JAWS/IE has caught up with other systems and can navigate by headings, although it is still somewhat painful in Explorer if you don't have JAWS - contrary to what I asserted a while ago the javascript-based additional functions tend to have poor structure navigation options.) It seems to me that building reliable systems is often the best way to serve the most people. And reliable systems tend to require that validation is more important overall than a particular presentation aspect. As Joe Clark has pointed out, you should be able to build valid, semantically correct content and expect users to have tools that implement standards (whether they are on a phone, a new shiny machine, a library or school computer, using an augmentative systemm to provide a signing avatar, extra glossary, or similar comprehension aid...). Reality turns out not to be quite like that - people do have poor tools, and cannot always replace them with something that works better. But pandering to broken tools tends to be at the expense of longer-term solutions, and I think it is very important to look for alternative repair strategies that don't break validation and semantics for others... cheers Chaals On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Maurizio Boscarol wrote: >The same difference between serving a validator rather than serving >people. Ok, it's a suggestive declaration, I know... ;-) and I have >nothing against validators, parsers and such algorithmical tools. But I >still prefere people, that's all. If I can't serve both, then I prefer >to serve people. > >Where am I wrong?... :) > >Maurizio > Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles tel: +61 409 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22 Post: 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia or W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Monday, 19 April 2004 10:59:04 UTC