RE: priority of 5.8

Gregory,

A related problem is the length of these id codes.  For a person with even
slight motor impairment, typing a 20 digit alpha-numeric code without errors
is nearly impossible.  I can't believe that all of those digits really mean
anything.

For what it's worth, the ADA guidelines don't require braille in elevators
for exactly the reasons that you mention.  They require raised numbers, and
a star on the main floor.  Are you able to identify large embossed symbols
any better than braille?

Denis Anson
  -----Original Message-----
  From: w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Gregory J. Rosmaita
  Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 12:40 PM
  To: Dick Brown
  Cc: User Agent Guidelines Emailing List
  Subject: RE: priority of 5.8


  Dick Brown wrote:

  quote
  One thing that's sometimes a problem with installation is entering product
  IDs that are printed on the back of CD cases, but unfortunately not in
  Braille.
  unquote

  aloha, dick!

  that is an excellent point, dick, and one which is often overlooked...

  but even if CD-ROMs were to be distributed with braille on-the-back, that
still wouldn't help the sixty-five to seventy-percent of blind people who --
for whatever reason -- can't read braille...

  which is the Achilles's heel of attempting to do business when you are
blind -- a lot of entities (such as the utilities company that provides gas
for my apartment) don't offer online account management, and even those that
do, do not always make your statement available to you online, or at least
not in a format that is usable if you are blind, and their quote solution
unquote to providing equal access to information is to offer me my bill in
braille...  the only problem with that is that the illness that caused my
vision loss also led to a loss of sensation in my fingertips, with the
consequence that i cannot read braille when it is embossed on paper because
i simply don't have the requisite sensitivity, so an embossed paper version
of my bill is as useless to me as a printed version...

  which cuts (in a roundabout and incoherent way) to the heart of the
matter -- all too often, the quote disabled unquote are saddled with
one-size-fits-all solutions that -- while they may meet the letter of the
law, certainly violate its spirit...   braille on elevator panels is great,
but you have to be able to find the panel before you can use it...  and even
when you do find the panel, you need to figure out with which buttons the
braille labels are associated, by which time you're already on a floor you
didn't intend to go to...  unless every such panel were placed in exactly
the same spot on all elevators, and the labels for each button were
uniformly placed so that you would always know which button they were meant
to label, then equal access has NOT been achieved...

  all of which is a convoluted way of saying that, in the instance of the
product ID codes, i would not be opposed to a software manufacturer
maintaining a consumer profile, so that when i receive an upgrade in the
mail (such as that which i received for Office2000), i wouldn't have to wait
until i could find someone to read the code to me, but could retrieve it via
email or over the phone or via the web...  of course, i'd want to make damn
sure that the customer profile was being used exclusively to provide me with
this information, and not for any other purposes, but that is a concern for
another list!

  gregory.



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  He that lives on Hope, dies farting
       -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
  --------------------------------------------------------
  Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
     WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC
          <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html>
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