- From: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 12:06:31 -0400
- To: WAI-IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
I certainly appreciate Al's efforts here (he can always be relied on to give a solid theoretical basis), but I don't think the proposed WCAG guideline deals with the same thing he's talking about. >The right goal for our effort, as Tom has suggested, is "what tip of >the information iceberg is most important to get articulated >verbally, and how can we get authors over the hump to articulate >that?" Unfortunately, that formulation assumes that a diagram or illustration (the canonical example that WCAG continues to flub) has one or two easy-to-summarize main points. A *gist*, you might say. There are lots of those, and I cover them in my book. But they are not the norm, and the entire reason we draw diagrams and illustrations is to make relationships that are hard to express in words visible and comprehensible. Through the diagram or illustration, the entire iceberg is available. It simply is not possible to reverse-engineer that iceberg into a simple "tip" that can be plunked into an alt text. Some things *cannot be expressed in words*. That's why words are not the only form of communication we use. It follows-- pay attention, Chaaalz-- that there aren't "alternatives" or "equivalents" for everything. >If we can communicate the right questions to the authors, they will >be able to articulate the answers. No, that perpetuates the fallacy. Some or indeed most diagrams and illustrations are permanently and unchangeably resistant to summation in words. You can't rephrase the question because the question cannot be asked. >The piece of this job that looks doable in the near term is to coach >the author through a bit of scene modeling and get them to >articulate what is in their scene, some principal properties of each >such thing, and principal relationships among these things. Then we >will be getting somewhere. > >This will create a guide to their scene in an >entity/relationship/attribute graph with navigable relationships and >speakable attributes. People aren't going to put a full workday into modeling, in some as-yet-specified language, every relationship that is apparent in an illustration. Nobody's gonna write some kind of script for a screen reader (similar to Jaws configuration files) to enable a single illustration to be read. Even then the experience won't merely fail to be the same, it won't even be adequate. *Some things can't be summed up in words*. >[The URCC primitives: "What's there?" "What can I do?" are still the >core of what we have to lure out of authors. Imagine yourself >answering these questions over the phone...] I've used that model myself in other contexts. But it doesn't work here. Many or even most diagrams and illustrations (to continue with the canonical WCAG example) are too complex for that. Essentially, WCAG wants the entirety of technical and scientific illustration reduced to TV-news soundbites. >Talking about creating a GIS-like infiltration of the scene >presented on the web screen helps the content designer/developer >think in graph terms and not be forced to take the harder conceptual >leap to a linear narrative. I see what you're saying (not everything need be turned into lengthy prose to be "expressed in words"), but even that amount of metadata simply *will not be done* by authors. They've got better things to do, and some will realize the futility of equating illustration with words. >Anything we do to lower the potential barrier to getting over the >belief that it's too hard is golden, is critical to our success. WCAG WG and WAI need to accept that "express[ing] in words" isn't merely hard some of the time, it's impossible. *Some things can't be made accessible to everyone*. That's why, for example, we have undue-hardship exemptions in human-rights legislation. > Presented with a tree-view presentation of the objects they have >identified in their scene, an author can readily from this view >create a sensible tour, a linear reading order. There isn't a "linear reading order" inherent in everything. It's a bit late in the day to suggest that the Web-- a non-linear medium-- must be reduced to a straight line. "Linear reading order" is another of those WAI shibboleths that needs to be de-emphasized. > >On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 10:55 AM, Joe Clark wrote: *Cough*. -- Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/> Expect criticism if you top-post
Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2003 12:10:23 UTC