- From: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
- Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 09:32:27 -0500 (CDT)
- To: WAI-GL <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Our esteemed colleague is engaging in the habits, exhibited by Participants in Good Standing and Approved Persons, of ignoring persuasive contrary evidence and reiterating the original falsehoods (as we saw in colourblindness). > What we essentially want, I think, is that every word in the > document be unambiguously identifiable so that it can be looked up in > a dictionary, pronounced by a text to speech system, or otherwise > processed. That simply *is not* a characteristic of written languages. English and Hebrew (the two languages most discussed in this thread) have many homographic or polysemic words that must be understood in their proper context and meaning by the human reader. That is the way the languages work; reading requires audience participation. That was true before WCAG 1.0 was ratified, it's true now, and it will be true long after everyone participating in this thread is dead. And it's *not an accessibility problem* for authors. Every attempt by the Working Group to clarify the intention merely restates the same requirement: Write Hebrew with nikud and make every ambiguous English word unambiguous. That horse won't hunt. If your screen reader stumbles on English homographs or Hebrew words, get a better screen reader. If you're dyslexic and have trouble reading homographs or Hebrew, lean on your adaptive technology, not the author. If you have trouble with *genuine* abbreviations and acronyms, expect the author *and* the adaptive technology to share the burden. But that example is qualitatively different. It is a much simpler task for adaptive-technology makers to improve their exception dictionaries and other lexicons than to force *every author in the world who wants to meet WCAG* to write in a way found nowhere else at all. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has no authority to force authors to write in some Bizarro-world manner in which no word is ambiguous. Words are sometimes ambiguous; accept it. The Working Group continues to show magnificent stubbornness and ignorance in dealing with this question. *It's a non-starter* (hear this well, Gregg). *We don't have to endlessly debate stupid ideas*, particularly when the Working Group simply ignores contravening facts. You'll chatter along all day about something without a basis in fact, but when someone-- like me-- points to clear and unambiguous data, you ignore it. Gregg makes this request: "[T]he best way to comment is to make a suggestion for how to address the issue that the item was focused at." The way to address the issue in question is to be grown-up enough to admit its proponents were wrong in the first place and *it isn't an issue*. -- Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/> Expect criticism if you top-post
Received on Thursday, 27 May 2004 10:32:33 UTC