- From: Matt Morgan-May <mattmay@adobe.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 10:20:56 -0700
- To: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- CC: "'Maciej Stachowiak'" <mjs@apple.com>, "'Karl Groves'" <karl.groves@ssbbartgroup.com>, "'Andrew Sidwell'" <w3c@andrewsidwell.co.uk>, <public-html@w3.org>, "'W3C WAI-XTECH'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>, <wai-liaison@w3.org>, "'HTML4All'" <list@html4all.org>
On 5/26/08 5:59 PM, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote: > We have to > consider the costs and benefits of meeting these requirements. If > we enforce them on everyone, one thing we'll do is force a lot of > this content off of the Web entirely, which would make it accessible > to much fewer people. By this logic, Flickr, et al., would never have existed in the first place, since @alt is mandatory today. And yet, last I checked, it does. Standards are not laws, and you will not be legislating anything out of existence by leaving @alt mandatory. Furthermore, I've been around for most of the web's history, and I can't think of a single case where disability groups have demanded, or asked, or even intimated, that new web technologies or paradigms _must not be developed_ before they are fully accessible. That would make this argument a strawman. (Note: before bringing up lawsuits like Southwest, Target, the 2000 Olympics, etc. those suits were all seeking technically-feasible accommodations for users with disabilities; none of them, as far as I know, ever suggested that the sites should be taken offline since they were inaccessible.) - m
Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 17:22:09 UTC