Re: Validation as test for basic accessibility

At 05:44 PM 1/18/2000 , Bruce Bailey wrote:
>You are quite correct that there is no causal relationship between valid HTML 4
>and a documents status as being accessible.  I am sure that you would agree
>though that the correlation between the two is higher than mere chance would
>dictate. 

Yes, that's correct.  There's a correlation.  (See my "eating well,
exercising right" analogy.)

The correlation is that people who understand interoperability and
platform independence will do both of these things.

>I acknowledge that I could be completely wrong about this, I am taking a bit of
>a gamble.  If my assertion is false, it should be easy to disprove by providing
>an example!  Please indulge me.  I ask again, please cite a specific URL (or
>two) where the code IS valid, yet one or more Priority 1 WCAG checkpoints have
>been violated?  The higher profile, the better.

I'm still missing the point you're making?  I'd undulge you if I
could figure out why.

I will present the URL http://www.w3.org/ -- as Jonathan Chetwynd
and others have pointed out, the site is not built using clear
and easily understood language, checkpoint 14.1:  "Use the
clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content."

For example, the following is suggested on the W3C homepage as a
way to "promote web access": 

      * Promote internationalization by using Charlint to validate
        or normalize Unicode (UTF-8) data.

And I have no idea what this is even talking about:

      * Winie 1.0.3 is available. Winie is a HTTP/1.1 utility in
        Java. See how Winie solves the "lost update" problem.

Note that I'm not just some guy off the street, too -- I'm the
president of a W3C member organization and I'm on three working
groups.  And this confuses -me-; I have no idea what they're
trying to tell me about.  (What does Winie do?  What in the
world is the "lost update" program?)

Jonathan Chetwynd's comments about the W3C site are archived here:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1999AprJun/0361.html

Bruce, is this what you're looking for?  I'm not sure how to indulge
you on this.

-- 
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Saturday, 22 January 2000 14:45:36 UTC