Re: Head in the sand, driving a car

John,

Do you have any experience of people with a severe learning difficulty? 
if so please contribute positively, if not kindly don't assume you know 
something about this topic. I have been working at WAI for many years 
and find your comments to myself and a number of others occasionally 
unhelpful, and perhaps unthoughtful.

Have you read the script accessibility guidelines*? they were written 
by me some time ago, then reviewed by Jim Ley and Wendy Chisholm, and 
edited again by me, they are still a mess, but there is nothing better 
at present. Your company claims to know something about javascript, 
dhtml and accessibility http://www.wats.ca/education/  could you 
perhaps contribute?

If it is possible to design a driving game that a blind person can 
play, what is the essential interactive experience? for instance is 
input primarily aural or tactile? Adding alt text to the splat site 
might allow it to pass some notional accessibility standard, but a 
brief consideration will show that it does nothing to improve the game 
playing for a user without access to a screen, and a mouse. Can you 
consider how this could be achieved?

OK the driving game may be a little tough for now, but part of the 
problem of game accessibility is do-able and w3c guidelines are only 
very minimally helpful. In reality they may well do accessibility a 
disservice, as anyone considering designing an accessible game** 
realises there are significant barriers to accessibility, yet this is 
not even discussed in the guidelines, in fact as is evident, it is 
essentially very difficult to create a useful thread, let alone a 
guideline.

Jonathan

*http://www.google.com/search?q=script+accessibility+guidelines
**game in this sense is any interactive experience, rather than a 
textual one.

On Monday, June 2, 2003, at 02:14  pm, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:

>
>> One could compare this with a driving instructor's car,
>> different needs will require duplication of discrete parts.
>>
>
> Good analogy, except, as far as I know, the customization of the 
> Driving
> Instructor's car is left exclusively to the driving instructor.  There 
> are
> no auto manufacturers I know who consciously make automobiles that are
> easily and quickly "convertible" to a driver's education car... that 
> it can
> be done, yes, that it is the responsibility of the manufacturer, no.
>
> Ditto for web browsers Jonathan...
>
> --
> John Foliot  foliot@wats.ca
> Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
> Web Accessibility Testing and Services
> http://www.wats.ca   1.866.932.4878 (North America)
>
>

Received on Monday, 2 June 2003 16:45:57 UTC