RE: Announcing Michael Cooper as new W3C/WAI staff member

David,

> I for one, find this completelely ironic, and an incdication 
> of how little the comments of the wider WAI-G really  matter.
> 
> Look thru the archives -- all the way back to 1999,  and you 
> will ssee frustration with the misperception of "Bobby 
> Approval" and how its false positives were doing a disserce 
> to the adoption of real accessibility.

I agree that Bobby (and other eval tools) does not solve all the
problems that people wish that it did, and it would be better if people
understood what the limitations were and could plan for successful
development in better ways than to merely reply on Bobby for the
accessibility check.  However, this doesn't have to do with Michael
Cooper except insofar as he has been involved with Bobby for a long
time.

> Rather than rising to the call,  and evolving Bobby to be the 
> best it could be, no work has been done on it for 7+ years, 

I know that this is a false statement.  Bobby has been developed in the
past few years at Watchfire.  I can't accurately represent how different
it is from the last CAST version, but Michael has always been interested
in making it perform better and several bugs that I've discussed with
Michael in Bobby 4 were resolved in 4.01 and in the watchfire version of
the tool.

> How does this all relate to the announcement of Mr. Cooper you ask?
> The decline of Bobby is directly correlated with Mr. Cooper's
> involvement. He has been "in   charge" of\ Bobby both at CAST and
> Watchfire, and has failed to shepherd the evolvement of the 
> product in ainy shape oor form.

I don't think that it is fair to condemn Michael for any lack of
development that you perceive in Bobby.  I don't work at Watchfire, so I
can't represent the discussions that happened internally.  Perhaps
Michael was sitting on top of a large pool of funds for Bobby
development and decided to do nothing, but I don't think so.  Michael
has been involved with the WAI for yers now and has always been a valued
contributing member.  

> The WAI deserves, and can find, much botter.

The WAI deserves someone who is intelligent, (nearly universally)
respected, and dedicated to the betterment of accessibility policies. I
think that a great choice was made.  

AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Accessibility Engineer
Adobe Systems
akirkpatrick@adobe.com

Received on Saturday, 24 June 2006 18:51:32 UTC