Re: UA Guidelines

Terry Sullivan wrote:
> 
> Hello...
> 
> I'd like to offer a couple of small observations about the UA
> Accessibility Guidelines:
> 
> First, regarding Guideline 4.18, user control over UA-spawned
> viewports: seems to me that this needs to be a Priority 1
> guideline.  Currently, UA-spawned viewports "break" the
> history mechanism completely, and they provide the user with
> no cue(s) for understanding why basic UA functionality has
> suddenly stopped working.  Further, I can't see how it'd be
> possible to implement Guideline 7.2 (a Priority 1) without
> *also* implementing 4.18; a promotion is clearly in order.

Added as issue 175
http://cmos-eng.rehab.uiuc.edu/ua-issues/issues-linear.html#175
 
> Second, regarding Guideline 8.7, user control over information
> regarding links: again, I wonder if a promotion (to a Priority
> 2) isn't in order.  It's easy to imagine several scenarios in
> which user control over link information would be crucial to
> maintaining the overall "visibility of system status," which,
> in turn has been extensively documented as a key element in
> software usability.  For example, consider UAs that do not
> support a particular scripting language; a page full of links
> that, in turn, rely on that scripting language will be
> utterly unusable, and the user needs the ability to discover
> *why* the page in question is "broken."
> 
> I'm sure that my fellow software developers will agree that,
> as code requirements go, neither of these is particularly
> hard to implement.  I'm left to wonder why they've been
> relegated to secondary (or tertiary) status.

Added as issue 176
http://cmos-eng.rehab.uiuc.edu/ua-issues/issues-linear.html#176

Thank you for the comments, Terry

 - Ian


> (P.S.  Apologies for the tardiness of these comments; I've
> found myself a bit preoccupied of late, trying to get my
> dissertation results ready for a February defense.)

Good luck to you Terry!

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Monday, 6 December 1999 10:07:14 UTC