Re: apology on "alt" tags

At 01:57 PM 9/26/2000 , Kelly Ford wrote:
>Come on!
>Att 12:03 PM 9/26/00 -0700, you wrote:

The "you" is me, so I'll respond:

KB:
>>Hold on, a sec, I don't think the Olympic site was being _malicious_.
>>Let's not attribute to malice what is clearly ignorance or
>>laziness.

KF:
>I hardly think you can call the accessibility problems with the Olympics site the result of laziness or ignorance.

KB:

So you're saying it was a result of _malice_?  That's such a
bizarre claim that I can't even fathom why you'd want to promote
such a view.

KF:
>The people behind the site clearly know about web accessibility as parts of the site are very accessible.

KB:

I'm wondering if you have ever worked on a major web project or
a major software project.  It is _very typical_ to have varying
degrees of quality from section to section, as different work
groups will work on different sections.  It is naive to assume
that the entire web site was assembled by the same group of
people working on the whole thing!

Clearly some were aware of accessibility issues, and some not.
Those who were not are the ignorant and/or lazy ones, and they
generated the accessibility errors.  Which is what I said.

KF:
>It is more that they lacked the commitment to stay the course and then fought against doing so at every turn.

KB:

You make this out as if they had some sort of holy cause.  It
may be a holy cause for you (and for me) but this was not a lapse
of the moral fortitude of these people who were doing their jobs
(doing them, one would assume, as best they know how under the
circumstances).  Can you really find any evidence that the web
designers "lacked the commitment"?

>I think the actions that have resulted in the problems with the Olympics site are a clear demonstration of willfully excluding people with disabilities from full use of that site.

I think that such accusations are unfair to the web designers and
are amazingly misguided as they assume a malice -- "willfully
excluding people" -- which has not been proven.

It's one thing to criticize people for doing it wrong.  It's
another thing to fabricate stories in which they are beings
of pure evil vileness out to destroy all that is good about
the world just because they screwed up on a web site.


-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
Accessibility Roundtable Web Broadcast           http://kynn.com/+on24
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 17:16:55 UTC