- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 10:23:18 -0400
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@niksula.hut.fi>, www-style@w3.org
At 8:13 AM +0300 8/21/02, Henri Sivonen wrote: >Would you consider replying to you in Chinese to be a successful >instance of human communication? It's not a yes-or-no answer. Replying to me in Chinese would be more successful than not replying to me at all. It would be less successful than replying to me in French. It would be much less successful than replying to me in English. The Web is a many-to-many communications medium. Users speak different languages, have browsers with different features, have different levels of visual and auditory acuity, have different backgrounds and contexts in which they interpret information, have different connection speeds and bandwidths, and more. Each and every page on the Web will be more or less accessible to particular people. Decisions made that make a page more accessible to one class of people may well make it less accessible to another class. We cannot talk about accessibility (and here I mean accessibility for everyone, not just people with physical handicaps) as if it's a yes or no question. There are some actions we can take that make the web more accessible for almost everyone (e.g. not encoding text in GIF images) and that have very few tradeoffs. But there are many more choices that assist one class of people while impairing another class of people (e.g. writing in English or Chinese). To seriously consider issues of accessibility (and many other topics), you need to ask at least four questions: 1. Who does this help? 2. How much does this help them? 3. Who does this harm? 4. How much does it harm them? Considering only questions 1 and 2 while ignoring questions 3 and 4 (or vice versa) makes for good polemics but bad policy. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 10:30:59 UTC