Re: Going The Whole Hog

> I agree with this as long as "you" here is meant to mean "each person
> or organization will make this choice" rather than "there should be
> one standard applying to all of us."

Yep - the basic tenet of the rant was that there is a fuziness about
accessibility, and that is in some ways a problem (a big problem) and in
some ways a blessing. It keeps some of us reaching for that elusive AAAA
(ahem), but it also puts some people off of trying. "I won't rest until the
entire world can appreciate my page as much as is humanly possible" vs. "I
can see my page, so that'll do".

> On the parenthetical, I'm not convinced that triple-A is an impossible
> level, I'm just not sure if it's really a useful thing to talk about.

I don't think it's at all well defined, i.e. there will always be someone
that will object to a page being AAA compliant. That might not mean that it
isn't AAA compliant, only that the line that GL have drawn around it is
rather fuzzy.

> Gold star to the man from the mystery lights!

Hey, you read my site... aw shucks.

> We are in 100% agreement on this statement, Sean.

Really? Oh damn, I'd better change it then :-)
I quite liked that statement... I thought of it at about 4AM last night,
and considered adding it to my signature in N3 format:-

   :validation = :science . :design = :skill . :accessibility = :art .

> It's important, however, to remember that ultimately someone (meaning
> "you") will have to decide how far is good enough to go.

Hence the art thing, "if Van Gogh had used a little bit more shadow there,
it would have been perfect". If I just make this dang alt attribute more
meaningful to a larger proportion of people... I'm not sure what action
there is for this though, only an understanding that this is the case. Of
course, the assertion that people should go for 200 x A rather than 100 x
AA is what the debate centers around. It's almost a non-debate because "A"
and "AA" are only arbitrary representations of levels of accessibility. But
the message is quite clear: usability over perfection.

> just to ding you on terminology real quick, there are no
> "single-A guidelines", there are only priority 1, priority 2,
> and priority 3 guidelines.

Ah yes, I should say "my site is a suite of WCAG 1.0 priority 1 compliant
technologies" really :-)

> It's a continuum and we've chosen to represent it by three
> boxes, but lines were drawn and can very well be redrawn
> if necessary.

Rating is also a bit of an art, so that maybe different people would
appreciate different ratings.. well of course they would. The A/AA/AAA
scheme is good because it gives people something to aim at, but it's bad
because it not really all that clear what you're aiming at, and when you
get there, you still might not have achieved what you wanted to.

But then, I wouldn't want the rating scheme to become as awkward as the
guidelines are becoming.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .
:validation = :science . :design = :skill . :accessibility = :art .

Received on Friday, 16 February 2001 12:31:52 UTC