Practical reality

Hi all,

I'd like to reconfirm if the WCAG 2.0 has the premise that we consider
the "practical reality" or not.

At the today's teleconference, we discussed the captioning and the audio
description. It'll depend on the premise the WCAG WG has.

CASE 1:
WCAG 2.0 doesn't consider the "practical reality" but will define what
the accessible web content is.

In this case, we should keep the captioning and the audio description at
Level 1. But it is really hard for the authors to do that at this moment.
Both the captioning and the audio description require specialist expertise
to be done correctly. It could result in the situation that many web
designers/developers would give up the conformance with WCAG 2.0.

CASE 2:
WCAG 2.0 consider the "practical reality".

In this case, I prefer to moving the captioning and the audio
description to Level 2 and creating the new SC at Level 1 which require the
transcript for the audio information and the alternative text
description for the visual information. 

In Japan, we don't have any captioning tool such as MAGpie, though I
hope we'll have something which can handle Japanese characters in the
near future. The hardle for Japanese designers is higher than English
speaking countries at this moment.


I understand it is important for us to define the accessible web content
in WCAG 2.0. I also understand it is really hard for
designers/developers to do that even if they're passionate with making
web content accessible. 

It'll affect any decision we'll make whether we consider the "practical
reality" or not whenever we try to close all of the issues. So I'd like
to have the answer for this.



Cheers,
Makoto

Received on Friday, 4 November 2005 07:04:23 UTC