Re[2]: Ability taxonomy bh

     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