- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 23:16:12 -0400 (EDT)
- To: w3c-wai-wg@w3.org (WAI Working Group)
From: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org> I've read http://www.access.digex.net/%7Easgilman/web-access/process_points.html ... and I thank you for it already. Great! I sweat some over writing it, so I am glad if you found reading it worth your time. 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. Thank you for not quoting back the whole thing. My overall assessment is that we are in pretty good sync. My confidence in the process is way up from, say, the launch date. I have continued on a few points below, but I don't want to take too much of anyone's time with this right now. [big snip] > 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. There is more difference in our word-use than our management ideas, here. I see user-level descriptions of both requirements and solutions, and developer-level descriptions of both -- concurrently in existence in the process. To me a protocol is any method involving more than one agent. Which means we need to define method and agent... Suffice it to say that abstractions are included. The way I use protocol, the ISO-OSI model is a protocol for software decomposition. And I am willing to bend my word-use to the norms of the group as the group gets together and is able to assert a common view on these things. What I got out of your response is that you have a good grasp of the users' inability to write a fire-and-forget requirements statement and disengage thereafter. That's why I don't see a problem in the terminology clash. [snip.. back to Daniel...] What laws are you thinking about ? Which countries are they applicable in ? My familiarity is only with U.S. Law. There are precedents in public accomodation laws, the ADA, and fair housing laws that commercial entities have to be public and non-discriminatory in offers to do business. These do not translate directly to Web commerce, but the do suggest that there will be a body of public policy attempting to say that some distinctions are anti-social. The Web technology creates a whole web of new gray shades between public and private. How the policy comes down in the end is still up in the air. But our thinking should include the possibility that there will be some concerns enforced by legal sanctions whether criminal or tort. >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. [Al again...] I think that you can induce some of this just by the way you ask others questions and actually listen to them. Part of the problem is that the legal scene is changing perhaps faster than the data communications scene. I don't think that you need to build an archive to make the information come together. Link to what you can find and you may achieve critical mass. The linking may spread. > > 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. I hope I can be of assistance in this. [Al said "make a rough sketch of the acceptance test process one of your first products"] 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... You don't need scientific measures to get started. You do need to contact the right populations. Get them to characterize their experience of the 'Net and Web. Lloyd Rassmussen is a pretty good rapporteur for Lynx and the blind. 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. Go for it. Do something you can see your way clear to doing. It can grow from there. -- Al Gilman
Received on Tuesday, 20 May 1997 23:16:14 UTC