- From: T. V. Raman <raman@Adobe.COM>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 16:24:30 -0700
- To: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- Cc: WAI Working Group <w3c-wai-wg@w3.org>
Jaysen-- Why is the issue of how notes are numbered a special access issue? Using <P class = note> mumble </P> or more generally <DIV class = sidebar>foo bar and var </DIV> and leaving it to the stylesheet to decide how that is rendered is the clean way to do it, and there is nothing "accessibility specific" involved to discuss as far as I can tell. As a thumb rule, it's important to design accessibility solutions using the framework and machinery that is invented to build and implement general features --CSS is one such mechanism-- and the above has the greatest chance of success since it is likely to get implemented for the general user anyway. This said, then the only issue remains "how do specific stylesheet instances deal with creating effective presentations of the material"? That is a question for the person designing the user agent --and not a "decision by committee" item. In this case, the "designer of the user agent" will end up translating to "the person designing the braille or audio stylesheet". So now you can factor the problem down to: what mechanisms does the Braille stylesheet need to provide a presentation of the note in Braille. Since Braille is a two-dimensional random-access physical layout, I consider it similar in many respects to the visual layout-- modulo the fact that things wrap differently in Braille as a consequence of Braille taking up more physical space-- this said, there should be very few Braille-specific demands on the style-sheet specification-- what is required is a good implementation of a well-designed Braille stylesheet. Said differently, the CSS spec will probably be minimally impacted; however, attempting to take a visual stylesheet and mapping that one to one to Braille will probably produce bad/unusable Braille. So in summary, let's keep the technical work focused at where the work is necessary, rather than discussing general mechanisms for creating notes --those general mechanimss are worked on from the point of view of the general user --a good thing from our perspective. -- Best Regards, --raman Adobe Systems Tel: 1 (408) 536 3945 (W14-129) Advanced Technology Group Fax: 1 (408) 537 4042 (W14 129) 345 Park Avenue Email: raman@adobe.com San Jose , CA 95110 -2704 Email: raman@cs.cornell.edu http://labrador.corp.adobe.com/~raman/raman.html (Adobe Internal) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/raman.html (Cornell) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc. ____________________________________________________________
Received on Thursday, 31 July 1997 19:23:57 UTC