Re: WAI process whitepaper

Hello Al and all.

I've read 
  http://www.access.digex.net/%7Easgilman/web-access/process_points.html

>  I will count this note a success if it gets
>  people to consider these issues in preparing work plans, methods
>  and infrastructure for the Initiative.

and I thank you for it already.

As always when I have to reply an long message like this one, I try to
find the few key sentences and I ignore the rest (ignore in my reply,
but I have read it of course). Please tell me if there is particular
aspect I should have answered and didn't.

> The preliminary plans for the Web Access Initiative are based on how the
> World Wide Web consortium has run projects in the past. Work is carried out
> by working groups that communicate between meetings by email lists. The work
> is punctuated by real-time telephone conferences and face-to-face meetings.
> It culminates in a cycle of document drafting, review and comment. The
> review comments are handled via the group email lists. There are also
> minimum-participation thresholds for the working groups. One must satisfy
> action items in a timely fashion and maintain attendance at meetings to be
> considered a member of the group.

This is basically the text. You're a good outside observer! (do you
have access to the W3C official process document?)

> The Initiative should take a hard look at its assumptions about how
> people participate and find ways to improve the accessibility of
> this Initiative to workers for whom travel or receiving voluminous
> email streams are barriers.

Agreed.

On the email topic first, we already have created a working group and
a interest group forum, which resemble the lynx-dev and lynx-learner
list you're talking about.

Let's see how these 2 list work and then we can fix the problem if
there is one.

The issues related to archiving of these lists are being looked at and
your input about extended mailto and search is valuable.


On the travel front now. Travel constraints, whether driven by
physical, time or wallet disabilities are and have been a primary
concern to us. If you're worry that an invited expert is dropped from
the working group because he or she cannot travel to Europe or the
West coast, you shouldn't. 

For someone (a member or a invited expert) to be expelled from a W3C
working group (to my knowledge, this has never happen before), it
really has to be a situation where the person is in the way of the
normal process: sign up for some deliverables and never return them,
show up with no preparation and waste half of a common bandwidth to
get back in track, make marketing blurb instead of working toward a
common goal, that kind of things. As the chair of the working group, I
am responsible for that policy.


> Protocols are too important to be left to the developers.

I'd rather not start a religeous discussion on that topic, but I can't
help :-)

Protocols are developers' things.
Requirements are not.
 
Example: a requirement is that one should be able to add a web page worth of
		 descriptive text to an image.
	 another requirement is that users that do not use this text
		 shouldn't have to pay for it.
  These are user level statements.
	  
  One protocol designer answer is the D tag, another is the OBJECT tag,
  another one is Content negociation at the HTTP level (gimme this gif
  as text/html please).
  Developers have to discuss that and come up with a solution that
  fulfill the requirements, not the users.
  While doing so, they might have their own requirements and
  constraints (think of backward compatibility, truth and beauty of
  the markup, etc).

> The initial phase of the project should be dominated by characterization of
> the current situation: what works and what doesn't, what disabilities there
> are, etc. This should be led by the evaluator competency.

Agreed.

The only answer I have for your is that right now, although the W3C
working group has started, the IPO (International Program Office) for
the WAI itself has not. We're still in the wait-for-fund phase and in
order to do what you advocate, we must know exactly what is our
resource pool.
 
> Policy people and technology people have difficulty communicating.
> 
> Bridge-building between NetNerds and PolicyWonks is one of the subtasks on
> our agenda. 

W3C has recently hired a policy analyst, to do just that (across the
board, not just for WAI). His name is Joseph Reagle (reagle@w3.org)
and if you have specific questions in mind, feel free to ask him. 

> for the solution to work. One example is law enforcement. The proposal for
> the Initiative says that the Consortium will, through the Initiative, become
> an advocate for the disabled with the Industry. Stating this without placing
> law enforcement in the context leaves the picture unclear.

What laws are you thinking about ?
Which countries are they applicable in ?

From day one of writing the briefing package, Mike Paciello, Jim
Miller and myself have tried and wanted to gather more than just US
legislation pointers in our document. Guess what: it's too hard, a
moving target where most pieces are not in sight!

Again, depending on the resources we get, this is one of my favorite
action item: build up a WAI legit resource center for people *word
wide* to get the context they need.

> Qualify your model of who the players are.
> 
> I found the absense of groups such as the webwatch-l email list from the
> groups that are mentioned as potential contributors and supporters of the
> Initiative to be unfortunate. Groups and individuals that are prominent
> today meeting the online needs of disabled individuals are a critical
> resource. They can give us the success models to build on.
> 
> The invitation to the Initiative Launch went out to contacts that the
> organizers already knew. This list should be made public and revised with
> the aid of public comment.

Agreed and I hope I can count on people like yourself to help bridging
gaps between these existing virtual communities and WAI.


> People should be asked now, "How will we know that it is working." Various
> tasks will spin off from this, including testing of early prototypes and the
> development of better evaluation measures and instruments. A sketch of the
> "final selloff test" should be one of the first products of the Initiative.
> Not that it won't change a lot. But doing this now will improve the work
> done thereafter.

A hard one. We can build prototypes and evolve our spec to meet the
requirements of our users, but we will know if all that really works
in the field itself: are 1998 or 1999 web pages and tools better than in
1997, accessibility-wise ?

OK, so we first need to assess the current field situation but for
that we need to build up some guidelines and the tools that check
them, for which we need the technology straighten out first. Kind of
chicken and egg problem here...
 
I propose that we start with the technologies we know best at W3C:
HTML/CSS/HTTP. From there we can work our way toward including
additional topics, usage guidelines of course, but also better email
or archiving support, or less web centric things like Java or Windows
APIs.

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 1997 09:49:13 UTC