- From: <jim@arkenstone.org>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 97 15:09:43
- To: w3c-wai-wg@w3.org (WAI Working Group), w3c-wai-wg@w3.org
- CC: pcoelho@u.washington.edu (Paul Coelho)
I read some of this discussion of taxonomy and clients providing disability specific information to the server with some concern. I just finished service on the Telecommunications Access Advisory Committee, which was a federal committee under the U.S. Access Board charged with recommending regulations under the Telecomm Act of 1996. U.S. makers will be covered by the final regulations, which are currently out for public comment, when they go into effect later this year. The disability consumer groups were very concerned about being labelled as disabled persons in their interactions with the Web, knowing that all such data gets collected and that collected data usually gets abused. I would argue against building disabilities into the specifications explicitly, and focus instead on the accomodations being requested. Plenty of people who are sighted want the information provided to blind people, either because of some other disability, personal preference or some characteristic of the equipment they are using. Jim Fruchterman jim@arkenstone.org President Arkenstone, Inc. 555 Oakmead Parkway 1-800-444-4443 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA 1-408-245-5900 "Information Access for Everyone!" Fax: 1-408-328-8484 http://www.arkenstone.org ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: Ability taxonomy bh Author: w3c-wai-wg@w3.org at Internet Date: 5/21/97 10:04 AM Recently there was a rough consensus on the list in favor of special-need descriptors being sent from client to server as part of format negotiation. I think that we should make "the taxonomy of abilities and special needs" that these message attributes employ a development item, and that we should try to rope the doctors mentioned below into this task. Paul has contributed on this point on the dev-access mailing list. -- Al Gilman
Received on Wednesday, 21 May 1997 18:30:59 UTC