Re: Can we improve the accessibility of SVG1.2?

On Thursday, March 11, 2004, 9:30:30 AM, David wrote:


>> http://www.peepo.co.uk/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SVG

>> A rant at the 2nd London SVG user group Meeting last night

DW> Given that that document is intended to be a rant, it's probably
DW> best for me not to add my comments there.  The short version of them is,
DW> whilst SVG *has* failed to meet accesibility needs:

DW> - on the ability to copy graphics into Word documents, whilst many
DW>   people may think they ought to be able to do that:

DW>   * it is generally illegal under copyright law to do that[2];
DW>   * it is currently a limitation of the user agent, not the standard,
DW>     but if the standard were to intervene it would probably be in the
DW>     form of an explicit waiver of copyright indication that authors
DW>     could add if they didn't want typical commercial protection[1];
DW>   * mapping from SVG to WMF is likely to result in a severe loss of
DW>     information, especially as I'd expect an SVG renderer to resort
DW>     to bit maps when rendering for the display, for anything not
DW>     easy to do natively;


DW> [2] there are limited copyright dispensations for UK educational
DW> institutions, but I believe Jonathon would like the law to permit a
DW> lot more than those allow, including use for personal correspondence
DW> that was not of a primarily educational nature.  On the other hand,
DW> most copyright owners probably wouldn't like the bad publicity associated
DW> with enforcing copyright in relation to "severely learning disabled"
DW> people, even if many copyright owners make most of their revenue from
DW> sale to general schools.

For more on that , see this news article

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=54629

>> 'Under this Directive, a person who unwittingly infringes copyright
>> - even if it has no effect on the market - could potentially have
>> her assets seized, bank accounts frozen, and home invaded,' said
>> EFF Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze.

>> While the EU says that 'the draft Directive contains the necessary
>> safeguards and limitations to protect the interests not only of the
>> defendant but also of potentially innocent offenders, who have
>> unknowingly been involved in illegal practices,' there is nothing
>> that stipulates that powers outlined by Hinze cannot be applied to
>> the unwary 'tiddler'.

I assume that my quote comes under fair use, although it is more than
10% of the article ...

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 08:04:57 UTC