Re: A UK user survey an accessibility/usability

On 09/11/05, Maurizio Boscarol <maurizio@usabile.it> wrote:
> It's not reasonable to assume that the 208 users visited only valid
> pages. Most of the web is invalid. The users could anyway access and use
> them. And the problem they report don't seem reasonably directly related
> to validity problems (this can only be inferred).

One of the issues with invalid pages is that it's not always evident
that something is missing.

> The problem now is: do we need to admit this simple evidence, or are we
> making an "ideal" set of guidelines that assess only higher and ideal
> level of accessibility excluding the possibility that, at least at a
> minimum level, even some invalid page could not have accessibility problem?

The "simple evidence" is irrelevant.

> Sorry, but this point isn't pro validity. The problem here is the
> meaningfulness of the alt text, that can't be programmatically determined.

The reason I mentioned that was because you were surprised that
alternative text wasn't given a higher priority. I think this is
partly because if you don't know that other people are getting more
information than you, you don't realise you're not being treated
fairly. I do think that is also related to validity in this instance.

> Well, if you only need a standard to force UA/AT productors, well, that
> standards are the DTD and UAG/ATAG. I thought we should address real
> accessibility problems, from the most basic to the more rare and
> advanced (even ideal, but at higher level).

I may be remembering this incorrectly, but I thought ATAG had passed
the problem of validity off to WCAG? I'm arguing that validity is
dealt with somewhere, and that it is a real accessibility problem.

> Extreme edge cases?? 208 disabled user in real navigation cases and no
> mention to issues that we could infer be related to validity maybe is
> not decisive, but is definitely not an edge case!

Of course it's an extreme edge-case. It's not related to validity, as
no one is going to ask end-users about how important they think the
validity of a document is. Most end-users wouldn't understand the
question - I would be stunned and amazed to hear the response, "Well,
I did come across a problem with XYZ where there was a duplicate id on
the page, and I was unable to hear the associated header id for the
table cell." Inferring the importance of something where the question
hasn't been asked is not only an extreme edge case, it also leads to
incorrect conclusions.

Best regards,

Gez


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Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2005 15:43:03 UTC