- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 12:46:56 -0800
- To: "Bailey, Bruce" <Bruce_Bailey@ed.gov>
- Cc: "'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 12:22 PM 2/5/2001 , Bailey, Bruce wrote: >Please Kynn, if you think titles should be included everywhere, please >explain how they might be revealed in the graphical user interface! I don't think I've said titles should be included _everywhere_, but I don't agree with you that it's -incorrect- to include titles. How should they be revealed in the GUI? I don't think I've said they should be revealed in the GUI either. They're metadata, and metadata shouldn't necessarily be revealed in all presentations. >TITLE is largely superfluous, except on links and ABBR and ACRONYM. Until >user agents figure out how to handle the attribute, it should be avoided. >This IS a practical, real world, accessibility issue. Why? Most user agents either ignore it or make it a tooltip. Tooltips can be useful. >Kynn, depending on the weather, you are frequently in favor of backwards >compliant coding and even minor code tweaks to make up for idiosyncratic >behavior of Assistive Technology. I would argue that this belongs in that >category. Unless you are certain of the resultant browser behavior, avoid >TITLE. Depending on the weather? If you're going to make personal attacks on me like you made personal attacks on Anne Pemberton before she quit the WAI IG list, you'd best stop right now, Bruce. I think you are constructing a number of straw men -- such as the two I pointed out at the beginning of this letter -- and I also think you are making a number of incorrect assumptions which lead to your apparent (and mostly inexplicable) confusion about "what Kynn is in favor of" (as if that were worth anything; what matters is access by people with disabilities). You seem to be forgetting, most of all, that for the last year I have been advocating the solution favored by my employer, first Edapta and now Reef. Lest you think I'm blindly following the company line (which may be your next accusation, or perhaps someone will post the accessibility errors on the Reef page, or whatever), I'll add that I originally joined Edapta because I felt that approach made the most sense and in fact fit in with what I had previously independently arrived at as "the best solution." See, for example, the CC/PP page I posted during my tenure as the HTML Writers Guild's member of that working group: http://www.ccpp.org/ In short, the Edapta philosophy states that you deliver the best presentation possible to the user based on all knowledge you can gather about that user. This means edapting pages dynamically (or selecting the best from a pre-existing set), and that means that you can indeed make the types of changes necessary to account for problems with JAWS (assuming you know the user is using JAWS). What you perceive as "Kynn changing his mind on a whim" (or "with the weather" or whatever rather insulting terms you used) is merely "Bruce unable to keep up with the complexities of edaptation", dear friend. Perhaps it's my fault for not explaining clearly enough, but I think other people have been able to follow me and I've recently gotten some private compliments on my posts. >P.S. One _could_ make the argument that the behavior of JAWS is NOT broken: >TITLE is a newer attribute than ALT and therefore an author is more likely >to put more thought into TITLE (if present) than ALT (especially since we >know how bad ALT tends to be). This makes absolutely no sense, Bruce. --Kynn Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com> Technical Developer Liaison Customer Management/Team Edapta Reef North America Tel +1 909-674-5225 ___________________________________ BUSINESS IS DYNAMIC. TAKE CONTROL. ___________________________________ http://www.reef.com
Received on Monday, 5 February 2001 16:46:02 UTC