Re: General Exception for Essential Purpose

"Leonard R. Kasday" wrote:
> 
> This is a proposal for a general guideline which will I think, help resolve
> the image text issue, and other issues as well. Its a modification of WCAG
> 1.0 checkpoint 11.4 on alternative pages.    It also needs to be added to
> WCAG 2.0--I don't see an equivalent to 11.4 in 2.0.
> 
> Here's straw wording of what I'll call the "essential purpose" guideline.
> 
> <guideline>
> If a web page's essential purpose prevents you from satisfying a
> checkpoint, you can consider that checkpoint passed if the user can
> conveniently access an alternative page on which the checkpoint is satisfied.
> </guideline>

"Essential purpose" refer to author's intent. The Guidelines were 
designed based on user needs. The tension between the two is
the source of many issues.

In order for the author's intent to translate into content that
is accessible to users with disabilities, you must have 
markup languages that allow authors to express their intent with
content that can still be manipulated to meet user needs. You
must also have user agent support for those markup languages.

WCAG 1.0 was clearly designed to address user needs first
and author intention second. I think that it may be best to
leave it that way (even in clarifications), and that 
WCAG 2.0 focus more on the author.

Users have requirements. Responsibilities to meet those requirements
lie with specification writers, authors, and software developers.
As Charles has pointed out, in an ideal world, it may be easy
to divvy up responsibilities among those three camps. But in the
real world, the challenge is to identify who must do what, who
cannot do what, and what requirements may not be met by a given
set of guidelines. I don't think WCAG 1.0 was designed to, or
is flexible enough to, meet the needs of all users with disabilities.

 - Ian

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Friday, 27 October 2000 13:51:55 UTC