- From: Gez Lemon <gez.lemon@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 04:54:37 +0000
- To: WCAG WG mailing list <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
As the deadline for next draft being published is upon us, and progress through a typical teleconference is painfully slow, I thought it might be appropriate to thrash out some of the more contentious issues on the mailing list to save some time. There isn't much activity on the mailing list at the moment, so I can't see there being a problem. At least this way we don't run the risk of allowing important issues to be passed without proper consideration because we ran out of time, only to find that the next draft is receiving negative comments that take much longer to address because of the stage we've reached in process. It would be really useful if someone who was particularly unbiased could accurately summarise the discussions, as it is highly likely that particularly contentious issues will result in groups of people that feel passionately about a certain issue attempting to overwhelm contrary views by rewording the same argument in the hope that each rewording is counted as an opposing opinion. One of the issues discussed on the 3rd November teleconference [1] was about moving guideline 3.1 level 3 success criterion 3 [2] to level 2. To summarise, guideline 3.1 L 3 SC 3 states, "A mechanism for finding the expanded form of abbreviations is available". This success criterion is relatively simple enough to implement (compared to something like captioning, which requires specialist expertise to be done correctly), and is beneficial to people with cognitive problems, as well as exposing abbreviations to users of assistive technology (which benefits visitors whose requirements fall into more than one category). A recurring argument against any proposal for a success criterion that is beneficial to people with cognitive problems is that the success criterion may be detrimental to websites that are aimed at professionals. My concern with this objection is that the organisation's concerned are effectively admitting to an active discrimination policy, and I don't think that it is appropriate that our guidelines should be based on such a policy. This kind of elitism doesn't do anything for web accessibility, and there are many more situations where this type of assistance would be useful, as opposed to a hindrance. For abbreviations, it's a simple enough task to automate the expansion of common abbreviations for an intended audience in a way that is not obtrusive for those that don't require an expansion of a particular definition. [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/11/03-wai-wcag-minutes.html [2]http://trace.wisc.edu/wcag_wiki/index.php?title=Proposed_Guide_to_3.1_L3_SC3 Best regards, Gez -- _____________________________ Supplement your vitamins http://juicystudio.com
Received on Friday, 4 November 2005 04:54:42 UTC