- From: Wilbur Streett <WStreett@mail.Monmouth.com>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 12:08:34 -0500
- To: "Charles F. Munat" <chas@munat.com>, "'Wilbur Streett'" <WStreett@mail.Monmouth.com>, "'Brian Milloy'" <bmilloy@interlog.com>, "'Aaron Swartz'" <aswartz@swartzfam.com>
- Cc: "'Sean B. Palmer'" <sean@mysterylights.com>, <www-talk@w3.org>, <www-html@w3.org>
At 01:03 PM 1/21/01 -0800, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>Wilbur Streett:
>"If you want to help the blind do it yourself, don't force the burden onto
>others."
>
>So he should go to all the owners of web sites whose pages are inaccessible
>to the blind and offer his services for free? Let's see, if he can fix one
>site a day, he'll be finished in, oh... where's my calculator. Hmmm. Well! I
>guess he'll never finish.
.. and the blind will never surf to most of those web sites either. Do you
have a point?
>What exactly are you recommending, Mr. Streett?
That rather that trying to force people to do what he thinks is
appropriate, to do what he thinks is appropriate himself.
If he can't find a solution to resolve the boundary between images and
blindness that is easy enough for himself to implement, then why should he
be allowed to force it onto the rest of the world?
Expression isn't what you tell me to say, it's what I say. If you want to
translate it into a form that a blind person can see, and can find a way to
do it, then God help you, but don't pretend that you can demand it of me.
But the reality is that less than 5% of the entire world is literate, and
yet everyone on this list pretends that the issue is the blind, when it's
really the illiterate. Even then, the literacy isn't defined to be US
English, and that moves the message into a much smaller space of people
that will actually comprehend it.
We don't need to translate all of the websites in the world so that blind
people can grasp Salvidor Dali's work. On the other hand, if the man
really cares about the blind, then he'll come up with a way to translate
the medium into something that EVERYONE, not only the blind can comprehend.
I'm working on doing that right now. I'm not going to engage in XML or the
latest nonsense to do it. I'll translate HTML on the fly into scripts for
the technology that I've created. I'll offer translation services into
better implementations for those sites that people want to see that I think
are worth it, and (gasp), I'll even charge for it on occasion.
Wilbur
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Putting A Human Face On Technology ;-)
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Literally! http://www.TheFaceOf.com
Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 00:07:17 UTC