the ramp to nowhere:

So, in accordance with you can make it accessible and not usable, suppose we
have a ramp that meets the atag requirements to have a ramp for ada's sake
here in the us.  Suppose though that that ramp stops a foot from the door at
the top of it,  How is the wheell chair user supposed to traverse that
distance through thin air?

This is the best analagy I could come up with with regard to accessibility.
As I said before, we need a different word to describe it possibly, but all
the techno fixes in the world will not make a page/site seem accessible to
someone who cannot use it.  This is how the technology is broken to begin
with.  We need to fix the technology and part of fixing the technology is
fixing the way we view its function, purpose and use.  If I handed out
braille agendas at corporate meetings, how many members would see them as
accessible, yet, they can rub them with their fingers, see the dots with
their eyes.  Accessible but not usable is not accessable there is no such
thing as usable but not accessible because in our case, usable is a subset
of accessible and accessible is a subset of usable.  They are conjoined
subsets of each other's converse and we cannot decouple them lest we put
ourselves in danger of having to write two documents.  One would be a
document that any requirements for developpers could be based on and the
other would be a set of best practices that provide for a capable experience
with the widest audience possible.

Johnnie Apple Seed

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 14:42:15 UTC