W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

Thank you for the opportunity to review the last call guidelines.  I have 
not been following your discussions since the last call, and I was pleased 
to find how clear and well-organized the document is.  Committee-written 
documents are seldom so coherent.  Good work.

I approve of the committee decision not to write specific guidelines for 
braille and synthesized speech.  My concern is that such specific 
guidelines are as likely to do harm by outlawing creativity as to do good 
by outlawing stupidity.  I have always been a little concerned about the 
effect of guidelines on creativity, and I am very pleased that you 
specifically stated in the introduction that user agents that do not meet 
every guideline are not necessarily inaccessible.  You do also recognize 
the possibility that a user agent may not be accessible even if it meets 
all guidelines.  However any developer who makes an effort to stay true to 
the purpose of the guidelines is likely to create a superior user 
agent.  So the committee has done its work well in my opinion.

John Gardner
Professor and Director, Science Access Project
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-6507
tel: (541) 737 3278
FAX: (541) 737 1683
e-mail: John.Gardner@orst.edu
URL: http://dots.physics.orst.edu

Received on Monday, 14 May 2001 01:08:25 UTC