Re: the ramp to nowhere:

Ah, The braille idea is an interesting one.  So, if braille is inaccessible
to the sighted, than, it follows that a site that is unusable to a blind
person using assistive technology even though it is coded with all
accessibility techniques in play leaving out all the checks that cannot be
done automatically is also inaccessible since as with the braille, the
sighted can read it with their eyes and even with their fingers if they are
capable of doing so and the assistive technology user can access all the
information on the web page, it's just not meaningfull or usefull which
gives her the feeling that it is not accessible.

Johnnie Apple Seed

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Juan Ulloa" <julloa@bcc.ctc.edu>
To: "david poehlman" <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>; "wai-ig
list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 11:04 AM
Subject: RE: the ramp to nowhere:




David Poehlman said:

>  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 makes this entry way inaccessible by definition.  This is not about
usability.


>  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.

I disagree. The Braille format is inaccessible to users who don't read
Braille.  I personally think this is a bad analogy. Would you make the
same argument for handing a book on take for to a group of deaf users?
I wouldn't.  The beauty of the medium we are discussing is that you can
have content written in English and text readers can read it to those
users. You can also have an audio clip and (if you make it accessible)
the deaf user can access its contents. This is about accessibility, not
usability.

Juan Ulloa

Received on Thursday, 26 August 2004 01:42:29 UTC