RE: How to Complain to a Webmaster

Sorry about the HTML mail. I've reset my mail settings so it'll be plain
text from here on.

I'm not sure if you're arguing against my position or for it. To be
clear, I'm not arguing for trying to educate individual designers. We
need to target both the design community and the people who are paying
for the sites, and I think a good way to do that is by discussing
publicly (e.g. in the press) sites that don't meet the bar. I agree with
Kynn that we need to do this in a helpful and constructive way, but we
need to do it.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Ley [mailto:jim@jibbering.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 10:16 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: How to Complain to a Webmaster

Ben Canning:

[Could someone suggest how we go about complaining to posters about not
posting 68k HTML messages to a mailing list?  maybe RFC1855? maybe
"Email
interactions are guided by general net-etiquette conventions" - from the
privacy policy - Any other suggestions?]

>Kynn, I agree with (as usual) about 90% of what you say below. It's
>important that we recognize that the problem is one of ignorance and
> misunderstanding on the part of designers rather than malice, and
>provide as much help as we can to correct the problems we see.

Certainly it's not malice, but I'm intrigued as to why we should do so
much to pander to a professional's inability to do their job?  I
wouldn't
expect a Doctor's lack of professional ability to be quietly pointed out
in an email, and then if it doesn't get an appropriate response ignored
for a month and it simply resent?  Why should we do that with web
authors?

I also believe that policy makers in the website should be included from
the start, so many of the inaccessible sites come from the fact that
those commissioning the site, believe there are maybe 2 browsers, and 2
operating systems, and everyone looks at the web the same, this means
that in the bidding process, the "designers" who come up with the
multimedia flash presentation will often win, simply because it "looks
good", even though they do not have the skills to author websites.

The way to get Accessible sites, is to educate the people who commission
them, that way, we ensure that the developers make accessible sites, as
those are the ones that survive - the professional designer, who knows
their trade will get the job, those that don't will fall by the wayside.
I can't see how educating individual designers, will help, how do they
pay for the refitting of the site? - they'd need to convince the guy
with
the budgets - so why not get them involved straight away, people with
accessibility experience are going to have a better chance of explaining
it than to a designer who's just been pointed to a few resources.

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2001 13:35:07 UTC