Re: Scott's Hypothetical Intranet

At 07:21 PM 10/26/1999 -0400, Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:
>one cannot just sit down and quote learn JAWS unquote and MSIE in one fell
>swoop and expect to be proficient with both...
>take the blinders off, kynn -- or, rather, put them on...   fire up JAWS
>(after, of course, unplugging your monitor and mouse) and quote see unquote how
>far you get (although you have an unfair advantage in that you are already
>proficient using MSIE, even though i know that it is not your first browser of
>choice)

Neither can one simply sit down and easily learn a lot of other software.
In general, there's a learning curve associated with each piece of
software, and some are harder to learn and some are easier to learn.

That's beside the point, though -- if your company says "learn this
software", you don't say "no, I don't want to learn it, I prefer this
other software that you haven't provided to me and you don't support
and which doesn't function on your network"; you say, "Okay, I'll
learn it."

I prefer to use a unix machine.  If I get a job using a mac, I'll
learn to use the mac; I can't just require that they provide me with
a unix machine.

>no, real life isn't burger king, and you can't always have it your way, but
>neither is the hypothetical blind employee a slab of frozen meat by-products,
>to be slapped down upon a one-size-fits-all flame broiler...

Nor is the hypothetical NON-blind employee.  But it's a fact of life
that the employer more times than not will dictate the software,
especially when you are talking about access to company-wide resources
such as an Intranet.

Your arguments are valid -- but they're equally valid when we remove
the disability issue entirely from the discussion.  This means that it's
an issue that does _not_ involve accessibility, but rather involves choice
of software in an enterprise-wide corporate system.  Sure, I'd love it
if I could choose to use Unix, my co-worker could choose to use a Mac,
and our third co-worker could use Windows 98.  But in the real world,
we don't get that choice.

Likewise, as long as the company provides _a_ way for each person who
works there, who has a disability, to be able to access the Intranet,
I don't think they should be obligated to support _ALL_ ways to access
the Intranet.

(Out of curiousity, does the difference between Intranet and Internet
come across clearly on speech synths?  I know sometimes in normal
discussion I can mishear the two terms when it's being discussed.)

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 1999 19:31:06 UTC