- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 21:14:47 +1000
- To: www-di <www-di@w3.org>
Kai Hendry writes: > > On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 04:24:55PM +0100, Rotan Hanrahan wrote: > > problem. It can be (partially) solved by adding metadata to "explain" the content, > > from which an informed decision might be reached. > > I don't think semantics is going to catch on very quickly. Most people > can't link correctly. I think it largely depends on the availability of good tools, and will probably be taken up initially by organizations with significant technical resources. I can also envisage the emergence of third-party annotation services creating metadata to explain or provide additional semantics for Web content, with device independence applications in mind. > > And thinking about "accessibility" for awhile, I have to the conclusion > that it should narrowed down to people who are specifically disabled (in > the legal sense) and require special needs. It should not be a catchall > term. Why not? If your delivery context requires that you use a speech interface, for example, surely it doesn't matter so far as the technical solution is concerned whether this is because you are driving a car or have a disability. The technical requirements may be the same in both scenarios; unless a speech interface is available, the content is inaccessible to you. Of course there is a policy difference in that the person with a disability, unlike the person who is driving a car, can't simply change the context (e.g., by moving to a graphical workstation in the driver's case) and thereby gain access to content which, in the car, would be inaccessible. Rather, lack of support for a speech interface, in the above example, may effectively deprive the person with a disability of any access to the content; and hence it is an issue with which public policy is legitimately concerned on human rights grounds. However, from a functional standpoint, as mentioned earlier, the person with the disability and the driver are in delivery contexts that, again in the example proposed, are satisfied by identical technical means. I would rather say that it is a question of accessibility in both cases, but for the driver it is obviously not a question of "accessibility to people with disabilities", which is a subset of "accessibility" tout court. > > I also would like to suggest changing the tagline of d-i from: > "Access to a Unified Web from Any Device in Any Context by Anyone" > > to something clearer, such as: > > "Making the web portable" > > or > > "Scaling the web" > > or > > "Caring about platform interoperability" To the contrary, I think the current wording is much clearer and I prefer it to any of the alternatives proposed. > > I would like the d-i do more to certify user-agents. Test suites and > guidelines. On this and the remaining points I agree with Roger's comments.
Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 07:25:57 UTC