- From: Lois Wakeman <lois@lois.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 10:02:50 +0100
- To: "WAI list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Tina, Perhaps I am being naive, but I think a little common sense is called for here. Since the web is, in name and general intention, worldwide, then any attempt to compartmentalise it along geographical (or indeed any other) lines seems completely counter-productive and wrong-headed. Even if it were true that Sweden has special, privileged, technology characteristics *and* we assume that only Swedes will ever use a Swedish web site, what about expatriates who may live in parts of the world where they need to use Lynx and a tin can on a string to get access to the WWW? Then, if we do fly in the face of reason and decide to have country-specific guidelines, how do we specify access requirements for different countries with commonly spoken languages? English, Spanish, French and Portuguese come immediately to mind: how do guidelines for sites written in those languages and perhaps of interest to all speakers* take account of the likely differences in AT between, say, New York and rural parts of India where English may be spoken or at least of interest to surfers, or Paris and Algeria (French), Barcelona and Peru (Spanish) etc.? * It is, IMO, a red herring to say that "Oh well, we're only talking about government sites for which this won't be true". Anything adopted in the public sector will almost inevitably spill over into commercial sites quite soon, as we have seen already to some degree. And since the drive is towards standards, to go in the opposite direction seems so stupid as not to need any comments from anyone who has ever been involved with serious web development. Time to hop off the soap box and get some work done.... Lois Wakeman ------------------------------------------------------ http://lois.co.uk http://siteusability.com http://communicationarts.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 9 September 2003 05:03:44 UTC