- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 11:38:15 -0700
- To: Ann Navarro <ann@webgeek.com>
- Cc: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 08:56 AM 6/11/1999 , Ann Navarro wrote: >If accessibility is about understanding, the WAI guidelines need some >serious additional work, because they provide access to content, not a >guarantee (nor even the mechanism) that anyone can understand that content. Charles, are you going to propose that the goal of the web content guidelines should be "creation of web content that WILL BE UNDERSTOOD by all users"? In other words, now we're not merely concerned with the way in which the content is conveyed, we want to mandate the level at which someone is allowed to write on the web, as well as the specifics of the content? This is an absurd proposition, and I object strongly. I'm all for investigating ways that websites can be made more usable by their intended audiences, but to package all this together with "accessibility" is very dangerous and could scuttle our efforts entirely. It's hard enough that people think we're "mandating they dumb down their multimedia for old browsers" (which we're not); if we insist that people _do_ "dumb down" their _content_, their _words_ for a mentally disabled audience, then I guarantee you that we will have an even harder time "selling" this to web authors. Web accessibility should be about full _access_ to information and not about full _understanding_ of that information. Period. -- Kynn Bartlett mailto:kynn@hwg.org President, HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org/ AWARE Center Director http://aware.hwg.org/
Received on Friday, 11 June 1999 14:41:56 UTC