RE: Action item: new examples for Guideline 3.1

Gotcha, Joe-- a number  of other peole pointed out the same naivete on
my part, and someone (Yvette, I think) suggested a fix that would make
this an example of good practice rather than bad...

John


"Good design is accessible design." 
Please note our new name and URL!
John Slatin, Ph.D.
Director, Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin
FAC 248C
1 University Station G9600
Austin, TX 78712
ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu
web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility/


 



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Joe Clark
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:51 am
To: WAI-GL
Subject: Re: Action item: new examples for Guideline 3.1



> Example 1. A document that exists in English, French, and German 
> versions.
> 
> A corporate Web server identifies the country where a user's IP 
> address is located. It displays the site in the appropriate language.

> A user's screen reader automatically uses the appropriate 
> pronunciation rules, based on the presence of a language-identifier in

> the document.

We *really* don't want to encourage people to use IP lookup to guess at
a 
user's country of origin. (For more than a decade, every CompuServe user

appeared to be living in Columbus, Ohio. How accurate is that?)

A notorious and maddening example is of course Showtime
<http://SHO.com/>, 
which tells you "We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, 
these pages are intended for access only from within the United States,"

whatever the hell that means. (Won't they be surprised to learn that my 
Lynx install runs out of the United States, letting me read it just
fine?)

Country lookups break the universality of the Web.

The *correct* example to use here is HTTP content negotiation using the 
browser's default language. Yes, I know Jukka reminds us that most
people 
set this up wrong, but that's not our problem.

-- 

    Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
    Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
    Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Thursday, 27 May 2004 13:07:02 UTC