- From: Gregg Vanderheiden <gv@trace.wisc.edu>
- Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:58:10 -0600
- To: "'Yvette P. Hoitink'" <y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
This is a tough question. - do we really want to say that something is accessible if it cannot be used by people with disabilities -- but theoretically could if someday someone made a tool that allowed it? If so then should we remove the requirement for alt text for images of text because theoretically someday you could make a tool that would read the text right off the image? These two seem the same except on is new and one is old technology. Still - it is a tough question. Gregg -- ------------------------------ Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr. Director - Trace R & D Center University of Wisconsin-Madison <snip> I would like to go even further and propose to delete the entire success criteria that there must be at least one UAAG-compliant user agent for the chosen technology. I strongly think WCAG 2 should embrace new technologies. Technology and accessible user agents are a chicken-and-egg thing. If we require to use only technologies for which UAAG *-compliant user agents exist, you can't use a new technology that doesn't already have accessible UA's. That means that only people who do not care about accessibility use that new technology and the accessibility features are never used, to the manufacturers don't see the need to support those features. This leaves a lot of people in the cold. If, on the other hand, we say you can write your content on the (initially false) assumption that there is a user agent that is UAAG *-compliant, people will use the accessibility features of the technology and manufacturers will see the need to support the accessibility features. We have seen with WCAG 1 and Flash what can happen if we set a high bar on new technologies. Some of my own clients decided not to make parts of their website accessible because they really wanted to use the capabilities of Flash and did not have the resources to make an equivalent accessible alternative as well. They didn't use the accessibility features of Flash because that would cost extra work and they thought that wouldn't help accessibility because they still would not conform to the minimum level of WCAG 1. This means that even now that Flash plug-ins support accessibility features, their Flash content is still inaccessible. I really want to avoid this situation in WCAG 2. A simple fact of life is that organizations WILL use new technologies (unless forced by legislation). Instead of forbidding that, let's tell them how to use the technologies in an accessible manner so more people will have access to that content in the long run! Yvette Hoitink Heritas, Enschede, the Netherlands E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl WWW: http://www.heritas.nl
Received on Saturday, 18 December 2004 19:58:18 UTC