Re: Addition to guidelines

WWW access is a function of the following triple:

(document-encoding, user-agent, access-agent)_t
I suffix the tupple with t to indicate that since all three elements of the
tupple are evolving,
no sensible statement can be made without referring to the particular state of
the tupple that existed when the statement was made.

Any set of guidelines that proposes a guideline item without clearly
documenting where it lives with respect to the above triple is meaningless and
likely to cause confusion.

We've seen many instances of this in the last few years I'll quote a few:

"dont use forms because blind people cannot access them"
or
"dont have more than one link on a line because screenreader users get
confused"

Taken by themselves both of these are nonsensical, and fortunately neither is
true today.
However, they might not  look quite so nonsensical if taken in terms of the triple I
define above along
with the point of time those statements were made.


The WWW is a rapidly evolving medium; today accessibility suffers from the
burden of being perceived as
"oh those ugly things one needs to do in order to help those guys that can't
see"
let's try hard in not adding to this perception.

Just as we say the onus is on the authors to generate good content, let's put
the burden of providing accessible presentations on the user agents and
accessibility tools, rather than introducing hacks in the content to fix
todays holes in the access tool plus user-agent combination-- otherwise we
will only succeed in creating an even bigger and more unmaintainable mess.

-- 
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/        (Adobe Intranet)
      http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.html    (Cornell)
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    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken
as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc.
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Received on Friday, 15 August 1997 17:34:27 UTC