Re: PICS and accessibility

This cuts to the heart of accessibility. A poorly designed graphics-based 
website is automatically censored for a blind person, who cannot see the 
graphics.
I am (in principle) as strongly opposed to this kind of censorship by 
laziness as I am to censorship by direct restriction. Unfrtunately I 
think the worst (non-accesibility related) case for PICS offers both.

Providing information about a site, and using that information to select 
which site to view, is a standard procedure - it is directly analagous to 
the production of academic journals, where all things are not regarded as 
equal.

The question lies in where material can be published, and whether it can 
be at all available.

In this sense, the use of a PICS system, as Jason suggested, may 
provide the means for tyranny to enforce accessible design on the
web, rather than wait for them to do it voluntarily.

Nothing is without pitfalls - democracy as we usually understand it is 
really only the tyranny of the masses after all.

Charles McCathieNevile

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 1998 01:56:20 UTC