Re: Rating UA guidelines

I understand your concerns about big verses small developers and 3rd party
assitive technology.  But there are a number of reasons I think we should
only specify what we feel are important for the user interface and not try
to dictate what technology should have what feature.

1. Knowledge: The group as a whole doesn't have enough knowledge about the
current and emerging technologies and the internal dynamics of companies to
know if any technology specific recommendations make sense to implement a
guideline.  The more we can give specific design goals and the less on how
a company should do it I think the more cooperation we will have with
industry as a whole.

2. Time: I want the group to focus on design goals of what people need, and
not get into potentially long debates about whether it is a browser
function or an assitive technology function.   If we have good goals and
solid techniques for implementation developers will probably accept them.
We need to finish this draft of the guidelines and get to propsed
recommendation so that developers can start to use them.  So the more we
try to micromanage the implementation of the guidelines the more time it
will take to get a proposed recommendation prepared, and probably the more
diffciult it will be to get W3C approval, since member companies will want
to verify that our micro managed implementation specifications are
technically valid and acheivable.  I think we should listen to our
developer representatives in the group on what helps them the most
(developers, please chime in here to give your opinion)

I am open to discussion these issues, and would be interested in how people
in the group feel about these statements (good, bad, what ever).
Jon

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Tuesday, 13 October 1998 12:42:48 UTC