Re: Addition to guidelines

At 08:27 PM 16/08/97 -0400, Josh Krieger wrote:

>If they don't belong in the final W3C access guidelines, which I do agree, 
>they have to go someplace cause they are relevant for today.
>

(Hi folks... I am just back from vacation on a wonderful little island that
had an airstrip but no convenient Internet connection.)

I thought  Gregg mentioned a viable way to handle these "momentary"
problems in his proposed 5-section guide-format: as footnotes or
subsections of the cookbook (section 4) to address known browser or
assistive-technology deficiencies.  I don't think this was the wording of
Gregg's comments, but I seem to remember the sense of it.

For the record, I believe that such minutia ought to be retained in an HTML
Author's Guide -  in some form or another - as long as there are some
end-users who can benefit from a maximally accessible site.  When someone
hires me to design an accessible Web site, I  still code every detail of
accessible design that I have heard of or discovered over the past three
years.  Why?  Because 1) I know how to, and 2) I really do believe in the
small picture:  if even one end-user benefits from something I do - and no
one else suffers, then it is a worthwhile endeavour.  (For personal
gratification, I know one person who still uses Netscape 1.0n and
appreciates the <BR></TD> trick.)

The guidelines for browser, toolkit, screen reader, language, protocol or
other "future" development should, rightly, ignore this level of detail.
But, the page-authors' guidelines should reflect what we (the union of
end-users with disabilities,  accessibility "experts", and technical
"experts") know to be true at any given moment.  If the officially
sanctioned W3C Page-Authors' Guideline does not deliver such information,
there may continue to be a need for supplementary guides like Trace or
Starling to fill in the gaps. 

Chuck Letourneau

P.S.

Daniel... I enjoyed the Boston meeting... it was nice to have so many of
the key players in the same room.
----
Starling Access Services
 "Access A World Of Possibility"
  e-mail: info@starlingweb.com
   URL: http://www.starlingweb.com
    Phone: 613-820-2272  FAX: 613-820-6983

Received on Monday, 18 August 1997 15:02:13 UTC