Re: PICS and accessibility

A PICS-label bureau based on accessibility would be a useful thing, I 
suspect. Since one of the things that creates accessibility problems is 
lack of allowance for people not using high-bandwidth applications like 
Java or pictures, it could double as a way of promoting good design. Many 
people who have no apparent access problems choose not to download such 
things for the time it takes. If this could be translated into research 
which showed that people were filtering out poorly designed websites, 
there would be an incentive in the market to improve the overall standard 
of design. After all it takes about the same amount of effort to do 
something badly as it does to do it well.

Charles McCathieNevile
Sunrise Research Laboratory
RMIT University

On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Jason White wrote:

> It may be of interest, given that PICS is under discussion, to note that
> there has been some consideration of its use as a means of labeling web
> sites with respect to their degree of accessibility to people with
> disabilities. How useful do members of this group think that such labels,
> particularly if they were made by a party other than the creator of the
> site, would be to people with disabilities? Would it be helpful to have
> the option of restricting search engines or other tools just to sites
> which possess a high accessibility rating? What other applications of PICS
> content labels would be useful in the area of accessibility? Should the
> WAI develop a PICS labeling system with which web sites could be
> classified?
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 1998 01:40:52 UTC