Re: DC2002 and Accessibility Metadata

John Foliot's rather lengthy response, explains the standards view, from 
a reductionist standpoint.
(try to chunk material into one page amounts)

unfortunately it does very little to help the needs of, or develop 
understanding of the needs of people with a severe learning difficulty.
and this reflects current w3c/wai policy, which is none the less developing.

Our students and staff expect users to be able to click once and get 
multimedia content.
when every site has its own browser sniffers, knows nothing of bandwidth 
or plugins and this information has to be re-evaluated on each 
occassion, our users are seriously disadvantaged. It is plain that 
ordinary users find this an unneccessary trial, and one that needs 
attention.

Are we not to provide a link to charlie chaplin's the general, just 
because there is no text equivalent?
In my view if the host maintains that this is best viewed in a certain 
size window, they may well be right.
if it needs broadband, we may as well assume that is available too...

provision of a text equivalent, no more meets 'accessibility standards' 
than does the provision of multi-media, and we are a long way from that.

Of more general concern, it is possible to imagine a triple A 
conformance portal, it is the sites that it links to that present a 
problem, and that is not neccessarily, one of their own choosing. It is 
certainly time that more of our efforts were put into defining the 
accessibility of something greater than individual web pages.

Our students genuinely need a 'fun' experience to motivate them, they 
wont get this from a wap phone, or a lynx browser, and yet we still do 
try our best to follow w3c/wai guidelines.

jonathan chetwynd

Received on Sunday, 15 September 2002 03:56:49 UTC