- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 13:23:27 -0500
- To: Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>, cynthia.waddell@ci.sj.ca.us, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 06:21 PM 10/8/99 -0700, Scott Luebking wrote: >Ms. Waddell, > >Thanks for the information, but I might not have been very clear on what >I was saying. For example, a blind person chooses not to use the >Explorer because the individual prefers to use lynx via shell. However, >other blind people can use the Explorer with JAWS. The issue then >becomes whether the preference of the blind student or the preference of >the professor prevails. One interesting implication of this might be >that JAWS could be raising the accessibility bar. > Let's start by focusing an aspect of this situation that Cynthia raised and you have so far studiously ignored: that the professor is the deliverer of a public service, and the student is a member of a class of service consumers with identified civil rights. This points to how the rule of law in our society helps to reduce individual conflict. In resolving a disagreement between an individual professor and an individual student, the law says the University has to take into account generally accepted standards from the broader community like the WCAG which are recognized as protecting the interests of all blind students who might wish to browse the course notes, not just the individuals who happen to be enrolled in this session of this class. This moves the dialog off the level of a personal conflict to a question of what public institutions (the university) offer the public. This particular dispute has both technical and policy sides to the equation. Many professors at ranking universities may understand the technical side of the equation better than the OCR. On the other hand, it is likely that few understand the policy side of the equation better than the OCR. Academics are not accustomed to being held accountable to public standards of effective communication. They are accustomed to writing their own rules through peer review and the editorial policy of the archival journals. On the other hand, the modern technology that you speak of also has made human communication a much more open phenomenon, with the network patterns of who can participate in educational exchanges penetrating the ivy walls of academe much more transparently than in the past. This means that the freedom of academics to control their own use of media should be questioned just as much as the W3C's competence to set media standards for use in academic settings should be questioned (which it should). It's a new ball game. We all have assumptions to un-learn. Academe will be more effective in the end for undergoing the pain of this adjustment. And it might as well start at Berkeley where there are such smart people to figure out how to do it. Al
Received on Sunday, 10 October 1999 13:23:47 UTC