Re: QED & Marshall McLuhan

David,

you have touched on an important point here. There is a difference between
understanding what the requirements are, and being able to put them into
practise. And in the case of 'the clearest language which is appropriate', or
'appropriate graphic or multimedia ilustration', or 'appropriate textual
equivalent', the decision ultimately rests on questions of style. There are,
however, some general principles which can guide the developer as to what is
likely to be appropriate. If it is possible to know what is clearly wrong,
and what is clearly right, then it is easier to decide whether something new
is likely to be right or wrong.

And as you have pointed out, if dancing penguins seem to be the appropriate
thing, there are some guidelines about how they should be incorporated in an
accessible page.

cheers

Charles McCN

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, David Poehlman wrote:

  looking at the issue for a week now, here is what we are up against. 
  the wai guidelines as they stand, state that if you do certain things,
  there must be things done that ensure that technologies other than
  perhaps your high end browser can access them.  What is wished for by
  non readers is that content be delivered and composed in such a way as
  to make it understandable.  we've been talking about the fundamental
  difference here.  My proposed guidelines do nothing really for non
  readers and may even overlap what the wai already has.  I will not
  write my site and don't know how to write my site because I lack the
  vision to do it in such a way as to make it richly rewarding for the
  non reader unless I know that the non reader is going to be a large
  part of my paying audience or unless I am specifically being
  contracted to do it.  I'd have to have help with this at any rate.  as
  things now, with a bit of help for visual stuff, I can write good well
  designed web sites that are easy to read and comprehend because I must
  have easy to read and comprehend sites in order to get any thing out
  of them because complex sites are tough for me personally to deal
  with.  Does this help at all?  It comes down here unfortunately then
  to a matter of site style.  If you choose to populate your site with
  neat little dancing figures or grapfruit or singing birds, then,
  follow all the other guidelines.
  -- 
  Hands-On Technolog(eye)s
  Touching The Internet:
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  ---sig off---
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Sunday, 13 June 1999 15:04:52 UTC