- From: Charles F. Munat <chas@munat.com>
- Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 23:29:04 -0700
- To: "'David Poehlman'" <poehlman@clark.net>
- Cc: "'WAI Interest Group \(E-mail\)'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
"Charles F. Munat" wrote: "It might be [unfair] if there were information available not directly related to driving a bus, but in the absence of such information, I contend that it is not unfairly discriminatory. Blind people do not drive buses." David Poehlman replied: "Would that this were true. I can think of a thousand reasons why this might be unfair. I might be writing a book. I might be helping to train a driver. I might be studying this in a course setting." Reply: Agreed. But that brings up the question: Is it the responsibility of the site builder to make the site accessible for purposes other than its stated purpose? OK, if you were helping to train a driver, that might make sense. But if this site is to train drivers does the site owner have an obligation to make the site useful for potential authors and anyone else who wants to check it out? It's just an example and obviously not a very good one. It's difficult to think of instances where being blind would obviate all need for information. But you made another point later that bears on this. I'll comment further below. David Poehlman wrote: "The intended audience of the web should be anyone who can get to it. There is nothing more exasperating than to come to what for me is a blank page or a page that says I am using the rong browser or some such nonsense. I figure that if it isn't intended for us all, it is wasting space on the World Wide Web." Reply: I have a really hard time with this concept. Wasting space? How can one waste space on an infinite resource? It seems to me that the presumption here is that by making documents accessible via the Web, you are publishing them. I don't know how the law views this, but that seems a bit restrictive to me. With the increase of full-time, high-bandwidth connections, it gets even trickier. My computer has been assigned a static IP address. I have a web server on my computer for my own personal use. I like my brother to be able to pull stuff off my server, so I've allowed access via the Web. Nothing on my server is really personal, so I haven't password protected the pages. Or maybe I don't even know how to do that. Now, let's say that somehow a spider found my pages and indexed them. These are really for my personal use. Am I now responsible for making sure that they are accessible just because you might stumble across them someday? Isn't that like saying that my front door has to be accessible so that paraplegic solicitors can ring my bell? I'm not asking them to come visit me. It's different if one is running a business. Clearly, businesses should not discriminate unfairly. But what if I'm just putting up pages for fun? Please note that I'm not advocating any particular position here, just wondering about the limitations. Look at it another way. Do I have to post my pages in all 4000+ languages? Obviously, that's impossible. But a speaker of virtually any language might stumble across my pages, so don't I have an obligation to him? You see what I mean? It is a very complicated issue. When it's just a matter of making the document accessible, it's not that difficult. But when it comes to making it *understandable*, well, that's a lot more complicated. I want to encourage as many people to come on-line as possible. I draw a distinction between commercial sites and non-commercial sites. I agree with you, David, that commercial sites should be built by professionals, and that professionals should have to know what they're doing. And I think that commercial sites ought to be accessible AND understandable *within reason*. It's the "within reason" part that's complicated. What is reasonable? It seems to me that this is where audience comes in to play. If my audience is the members of my country club (I don't really belong to one) and none of them speaks Swahili, why should I have to put up a Swahili version of the site? And if one of them does speak Swahili, does that mean that I must include a Swahili version? As for non-commercial sites, I think we should let anyone do pretty much anything they want. I don't want to tell the man with Down's Syndrome that he can't put up a personal page because he doesn't understand HTML well enough. And I don't think that the deaf woman I mentioned should have to include audio on her personal site if it's her *personal* site. But I'm open to other ideas... (I'm sort of thinking out loud here.) Charles F. Munat Seattle, Washington
Received on Sunday, 22 October 2000 02:24:03 UTC