Re: notes re RC for IG

On 1/25/1998 12:17 AM, Liddy Nevile wrote:

>[last paragraph of extensive post]
>I am not worried about the name we chose for the working group - 'rating
>and certification', it seems, is not what we want to do - pure and simple.
>In fact, in some ways it is what we do not want to do.  My feeling is that
>we should try to focus on what we do want to do, and can do, and not worry
>too much about the name - think of RC as a random identifier!  What we want
>is to achieve our goals, and that will involve enough gathering and
>evaluating of information, creative development, and rich interpretation to
>keep us busy.
>
>Your comments are invited ...

Here's a first approximation of the tasks, comments welcome:

1)  Develop 'standards' documents, in a format that both gives specific 
guidelines and serves  to generate awareness of issues raised by specific 
disabilities.

Taking the example of visual impairment, alt-tagging of image-based links 
could be characterized as 'essential', while a RDF header with an 
abstract of document contents for those using text-to-voice services 
would be 'very useful'.  It would likewise be useful, in terms of 
text-to-voice, for links to have an optional, more verbose description of 
target document contents (to generate a concise list of links) - which 
would in turn be useful for everyone.

1 continued)  These documents could be circulated to other organizations 
for comment, endorsement, or distribution.

2)  Develop (standards for) information-processing technologies.  Eg. a 
look-ahead service/browser that generates a list characterizing link 
target document contents ('a large text document', 'a long list of 
links', 'many image links without description and very little text', 
etcetera).

3)  Encourage amendment to and awareness in the generation of W3C 
standards ... ie., suggesting that XML compliant apps be required to 
prioritize the parsing of the first document over the downloading of 
images (once more, useful for everyone).  [perhaps not the strongest 
example, but it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the 
moment].

4)  Encourage the development of applications that make 
accessibility-compliance easier (the alt-tag revision problem), and 
encourage the integration of accessibility-compliance into publishing 
tools.


  The only problem I would foresee with having a dynamic mandate would be 
the tendency towards threads that may or may not be 'noise', depending on 
perspective.  Maybe there should be at least two mailing lists:  
RC-ig@w3.org and RC-digression@w3.org [grin].

  Matt.

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 1998 16:13:07 UTC