Re: accessibility supported questions

and the "problem" that we confront here is the difference between WCAG
and the various different rules and laws of the different counties and
agencies.

Bob

On Tue, 31 Mar 2009, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

> Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo wrote:
>
> > But also, I am concerned that you mention the concept of "baseline" because
> > from my point of view, fortunately, the concept no longer appears in WCAG
> > 2.0 and hope it will not return to it.
> >
> > If our goal is to achieve accessibility for all, we can not leave it to the
> > website developers/owners to determine a "baseline."
>
> Hi Emmanuelle,
>
> I realised that I was dredging up the term "baseline" from previous
> versions of WCAG...old habit.
>
> The concept of the use of accessibility-supported technologies, though,
> still has this idea, although far less explicitly (and a bit less
> blatantly open to abuse). Every time a developer/owner makes a choice of
> technology, even if it's officially "accessibility-supported", they
> *are* in fact setting a baseline for their site. Otherwise, as noted,
> where does it end? If I use constructs in Flash, Flex, PDF that work
> 100% in the latest screenreaders, I'm still setting a conscious baseline
> by not providing a fallback for older screenreaders, or users without
> Flash. It may not be best practice, but the wording of WCAG 2.0 leads me
> to believe that it's perfectly fine(?). What if I use JavaScript +
> WAI-ARIA in a way that's supported in the latest versions? Again, I'm
> setting a baseline.
>
> Unless I'm missing something, that's been my understanding of WCAG 2.0
> all along, unless there's a mandated fallback to no-javascript,
> no-flash, just html there always is a (conscious or unconscious) setting
> of baselines on the part of developers/owners (in particular since
> W3C/WAI are not in the business of maintaining a list of
> "accessibility-supported" techs).
>
> > The only "baseline" should be equal opportunities to access, interact and
> > create content.
>
> Sure, but certain expectations (hardware/software) are inevitable. And
> certain applications simply do require newer technology and won't be
> universally accessible to people running 10+ year old technology, for
> instance.
>
> Again, this is my reading of WCAG 2.0. It may well be that I missed
> something, but that's been the understanding with most practitioners
> that I've spoken to (and the gray area of "where's the cut-off point?
> when can a technology be considered 'accessibility-supported'?" is
> indeed at the heart of this thread).
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
> ______________________________________________________________
> re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
> [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
>
> www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
> http://redux.deviantart.com | http://flickr.com/photos/redux/
> ______________________________________________________________
> Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
> http://webstandards.org/
> ______________________________________________________________
>

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Received on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 20:34:22 UTC