RE: Sentence in COGA Note

Hi Lisa, David,
Personally I see the goals proposed as compatible, with Lisa’s as the primary goals of the document, and David’s as considerations we need to attend to as well.
If something is an issue for people with cognitive issues this is the place to call it out, whether there is a feasible solution across all websites or not. We need to frame that appropriately, but any objection to the core guidance needs to have been through the background research first.
The reason I do want to consider the point about the original sentence (as one example of many, I assume) is the un-intended impact.
Saying “because of the design and content choices of the author” does make it appear there is blame being laid at their feet, intended or not. There are several reasons we need to be careful about that, top of my mind are:

  *   It can put the target audience off reading it;
  *   The author (in this context) may not be able to change or influence the decisions.
I’m sure everyone has been on a project where you’ve said something like “we didn’t want to do it that way, but…”.
So a formulation that uses “Design and content choices” rather than “of the author” would be more appropriate. Apart from that, I don’t have strong feeling about the exact wording.
Kind regards,
Alastair