- From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 17:37:03 -0400
- To: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 10:42 AM 6/10/1999 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote: >Yes, everyone should be able to _access_ the information, and >there should be a guarantee of _that_, but I cannot stomach the >idea that it is _my_ obligation to make _every_ piece of >information "understandable" in a way that is obvious to someone >with a learning disability. Kynn, you haven't "accessed" information until you can "understand" it. Anything less, isn't "access", it's an approximation. If information is put in a table and put on the web, you would have "access" to the information, but if you speech reader doesn't read everything within a cell as a unit, you can't "understand" it, and, if I understand correctly, that is the main reason tables are considered "inaccessible" and aren't supposed to be used creatively. A blind friend was recently outraged when she attempted to use the www.netlibrary.com site because she couldn't find a way to apply for the service due to the presence of "confusing" image maps. The information was certainly "accessible" to her in the same way that the Web is "accessible" to those with literacy and cognitive differences find the web "accessible", but she couldn't get any understanding because the information was laid over graphics creating image maps that she didn't know how to get around. A partially-sited person checked the site, found where the link to the all-text form was, and she can now do what she wanted to do. Anne Anne L. Pemberton http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1 http://www.erols.com/stevepem/apembert apembert@crosslink.net Enabling Support Foundation http://www.enabling.org
Received on Thursday, 10 June 1999 19:45:53 UTC