- From: Charles F. Munat <coder@acnet.net>
- Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1999 18:46:53 -0600
- To: "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 06:25 p.m. 01/02/99 -0600, Kynn Bartlett wrote: Well, he wrote a bunch of stuff. Rather than try to pick out quotes, I've reproduced it below. I half agree with the line of reasoning espoused below. Yes, business-people will make decisions based on what's good for the business. However, what's good for the business may depend on ethical issues. In the civil rights movement, the high moral ground was clearly held by those in support of equal rights for negroes. The moral underpinning of this fight helped to pull in a lot of people who might have otherwise sat it out. True, when the buses were boycotted the message to the businesspeople was sent on the bottom line, as it must be given our current business attitudes. But this message was made a thousand times more powerful by the moral indignation that roused so many other people to the cause. So do not underestimate the power of ethical or moral arguments. Nations have toppled over them. Overall your argument seems cynical to me. Worse, you make "idealist" sound like a four-letter word. Idealism is what makes us most human. It is our greatest gift, that we can see beyond our immediate needs. To dismiss this as naive and to play--quite consciously--to selfishness seems to me to perhaps win the battle but lose the war. It is a price I, for one, am not willing to pay. And I do not share your cynicism about humanity. Most of the people that I know are kind, thoughtful people. They only act cruelly when they are isolated from the effects of their actions. When they see the harm that they are causing, the *vast* majority are appalled and cease to harm. Now it may be that all business owners are evil (I doubt it), but even if they were, their business is a social venture depending on the support of society for it's existence. They will listen if enough of their customers demand it. Sure, let's sing the praises of accessibility for all, disabled or not, but let us not forsake the high moral ground. Charles Munat Puerto Vallarta ------------------------------------ At 06:25 p.m. 01/02/99 -0600, Kynn Bartlett wrote: Part of the problem here is that when you make it "an ethical thing" to support accessibility, you lose the fight. Because businesspeople _will_ make it a business decision, and frankly, the majority of people out there DON'T want to make things accessible to the disabled. It's the natural state of people to be cruel and heartless to the disabled, because people (in general) suck. Accessibility _is_ about more than letting a blind person look at your web page. If you try to sell it on the strength of "be good to the blind", you won't get very far. However, you _can_ make a stronger case for accessibility concerns by pointing out that it's not just "those stupid cripples who want, of all things, the right to 'see' something on a computer screen! (why, next thing you know, deaf people will be demanding the right to use radios!)" Accessibility is about making the web usable by everyone, be that someone in a car, on a phone, on a crappy computer from the 1980s, in a foreign country, on the moon, or even someone who's unable to see. Sell the benefits of access to _everyone_ and it's a much better sale than saying "hey, I'll tell you what, I'll break the HTML, thus guaranteeing fewer people can use your site, but hey, it'll save you money!" Any business person who buys that will go out of business soon! In short, I think you're a bit idealistic to think you can sell accessibility on the premise that people will "do the right thing" because they're ethical. Especially since it's not the only benefit of accessibility. -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://www.kynn.com/ Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet http://www.idyllmtn.com/ Design an accessible web site: http://www.kynn.com/+fedweb Tell your friend a celebrity wrote to you: http://www.kynn.com/+imdb Enroll now for my online CSS course! http://www.kynn.com/+css
Received on Saturday, 2 January 1999 19:55:17 UTC