RE: WaitingForBob -- Selfish Reason for Accessibility

The outreach and education effort about WAI is at a critical point now.

Cynthia D. Waddell

---------------------------------------------------
Cynthia D. Waddell   
ADA Coordinator
City Manager Department
City of San Jose, CA USA
801 North First Street, Room 460
San Jose, CA  95110-1704
(408)277-4034
(408)971-0134 TTY
(408)277-3885 FAX
http://www.icdri.org/cynthia_waddell.htm



-----Original Message-----
From: love26@gorge.net [mailto:love26@gorge.net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 7:22 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: WaitingForBob -- Selfish Reason for Accessibility


"Christopher R. Maden" wrote:

Working for government force will just add another reason to the pile
encouraging companies and people to take their sites offshore
(encryption
restriction, taxes, etc.), and besides which it pisses people off to
tell
them what to do (instead of showing them how it can help them).  The
conservative and libertarian sites that are railing against section 508
(if I've got the number right) would be taking exactly the opposite
approach if instead the WAI were presented as an industry consortium
voluntarily embracing a diverse Internet community without government
involvement.

That really sounds great but has had essentially zero effect. The
publicity surrounding Section 508 has had much effect including
engendering "backlash" from the usual suspects. 

Got to have standards.
Got to enforce the standards.

In matters similar to this in all civil/human rights movements there is
this frequent cry "you can't legislate morality, what's needed is
education." One of the best educations is a 2x4 upside yo' head. 

I don't know if Chris is advocating we take no further steps to
promulgate regulations concerning standards compliance by government Web
sites or the proscription against our taxes being used to buy
inaccessible software, but if he is...


-- 
Love.
            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 12:59:18 UTC