Turn of phrase

I hope that as an "interest group" we keep sight of what it is we're
interested in - full accessibility for people with disabilities - as
well as everybody being connected to everything. The importance of what
we are trying to do is often underscored by certain eloquences from the
Disability Rights Movement to which end I quote from a leader in the
field, Justin Dart:

"Too many potentially productive citizens are condemned to permanent
poverty in institutions, backrooms, and prisons of obsolete perception -
at enormous expense to our society.  This is an unconscionable waste
of money and humanity."

The "prisons of obsolete perception" are the cyber-Bastilles whose walls
must come tumbling down and a *MAJOR* tool is going to be CSS2.  When we
were told at the face2face that its inclusion in "major" browsers was
somewhat problematic ("you must realize that this is no easy task") it
was a severe disappointment.  Efforts to hurry and include an
essentially "rogue" non-standard browser-specific "feature" like LAYER
or the notorious BLINK and MARQUEE features were OK to rush into use but
CSS2, the most likely candidate for effective isolation of content from
presentation is seen as "trouble" for a beleaguered programming staff.

There is a pejorative term in our language: "blind rage" and it is what
one feels when confronted with the attitudes that confine deaf people in
institutions for forty years because somebody diagnosed them as severely
retarded.  A similar emotion surfaces in those of us faced with the
notion that point-and-click should be acceptable with no alternative
usable by people without use of hands or retinae.  "Poor unfortunate
blind people just won't be able to use computers."  This is
unacceptable.

Love.

         ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Thursday, 26 March 1998 08:51:44 UTC