- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 07:30:21 -0600 (CST)
- To: "Yeliz Yesilada" <yesilady@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: "David Woolley" <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Like David, I am not in a position to attend the conference (unless someone wants to offer to pay my expenses :-) But I think that there are two parts to the problem (and that David is overly pessimistic about what people are prepared to do, to the same extent that "we the accessibility advocates" are often optimistic about what we think people can do). The first has been that people are unclear that there is a need for accessibility. This is being addressed by work such as the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, quite effectively. The second, and more difficult, is that where developers and technologists are aware of the need, they are unaware of the details of how to implement it - the range of disabilities that people have, the range of solutions required, the value of designing it in at the start, and demonstrations of how that actually makes things more effective. In part I presume this workshop will look at real technical solutions, and at the difference between designing from the start and building them in later. But it is also true that the work costs money or time, in teaching developers about accessibility, in testing solutions, in thinking about creative solutions to difficult problems (this is especially so in rich media, which cannot go away if we are to offer accessibility to all people with disabilities, and not just a couple of highly literate groups). Like the Y2K bug, this is not something that industry cannot do, andd do reasonably well and reasonably easily, it is simply something that needs to be accepted as worthwhile. (My favourite Y2K presentation was from a programmer who said that there was never a problem, even in the 60's, making things Y2K-proof. They just never believed that people would still be using rubbish programs slapped together in the 60's after 30 years when the issue would become a problem). Addressing this last question seems largely a social queston, although it is helped by having as many "fully worked example cases" as possible. That is, instead of vague assertions about the fact that "building in accessibility from the start is relatively easy after the first time" (which I believe is true, because I have done it), case studies which have times, costs, successes, failures and lessons learned all clearly and carefully noted and analysed. No two cases are the same, but having an idea of exactly how much is involved in several similar cases makes a business decision maker's job easier. Having an unidentifiable amount of investment required to meet some set of requirements means that any responsible business manager needs to do a real risk assessment on whether the budget is more likely to be blown out by the accessibility work or the cost of defending the fact that it wasn't done earlier. Will the workshop be webcast on the #accessibility channel of freenode's IRC server, or something similar, for those of us who cannot afford to participate in person? cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org <quote who="Yeliz Yesilada"> > Hi David, > > This may or may not be the case. However, we are interested in the > engineering aspects of including accessibility support at the early > stages of the design, not only within Web pages, but also client side > technologies such as browsers and rich media technologies such as Flash > and SVG (as we believe Rich media such as Flash will not go away). We > are concerned that, as the Web becomes more pervasive, accessibility > support will not be encoded from the early stages; hence this workshop. > Hopefully, we'll get lots of interesting opinions like yours, and we'd > welcome your participation. > > Yours, > Yeliz and Simon > (http://w4a.man.ac.uk) > > David Woolley wrote: > >>>Previous engineering approaches seem to have precluded the engineering >>>of accessible systems. This is plainly unsatisfactory. Designers, >> >>I'm not in the conference circuit so I can't directly contribute to the >>conference, but to me it seems that this is not an engineering problem >>but a commercial/marketing one. It's about time to market, and >>looking "sexy". It's about what is perceived by non-technical management >>as the absolute minimum that will produce a healthy cash flow, in the >>relatively short term.
Received on Monday, 20 December 2004 13:31:34 UTC