Re: Aie it's HUGE

At 07:29 p.m. 12/07/98 -0800, Claude Sweet wrote:
>Is it an acceptable or unacceptable excuse to state "we didn't intend
>the guidelines as an educational endeavor, but only as establishing
>accessibility guidelines? I guess the answer depends on how you apply
>the excuse to other individuals whose sites and not accessible.

Well, another problem is that it basically gives anyone an excuse
for not following the current guidelines, at least, until E&O
publishes more "accessible" (understandable) documents.

I've watched the evolution of the Guidelines and things that
preceeded them; at first, you had a list of about a dozen things
that you should or shouldn't do.  It was incomplete by current
standards, but gave you enough information that if you followed
those short but complete rules, you'd do decently in improving
the accessibility of your site.

Things started to grow after that, and got sorted out by type of
design you're doing (multimedia, tables, images, etc.), and now
it's been reorganized again in several different ways.  Which is
good, except the content has swelled, to over 50 printed pages
as I stated before.

Which makes for a good book, but things are so detailed and
complex now that when you get something like the Quick Tips list,
it's not going to do anything more than state "this is important"
but not tell you how to do it.

For example:

"1. Images, Photographs & Animations
Use the alt attribute to concisely describe the function of all visuals. 
"

This is okay, except it basically assumes familiarity with what
the "alt attribute" is, and how to use it.  In order to find that
out, the web user is going to need to read more, and right now
"more" is back to those 51 pages.


--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
Enroll now for web accessibility with HTML 4.0!   http://www.hwg.org/classes/
The voice of the future?   http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html

Received on Monday, 7 December 1998 23:12:38 UTC