RE: RE Checkpoint 3.4 again

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Joel Sanda wrote:
[snip]
  But I have tried bouncing this off several people: graphic designers, web
  developers, and content authors. Some at my work place, most friends at
  other companies or folks I've done work with the in the past. All had the
  same reaction: "yeah, that's cool, but I'm not gonna do it". Most seemed
  intimated by the requirement or felt it was overkill and would consume too
  many resources (time and money and bandwidth for the I.T. folks).

CMN I used to get the same response when people were talking about providing
a text equivalent for everything. It still terrifies people who are putting
lectures online - many people (like me) have a hundred words of notes in the
form of slides for a two hour talk, and there is real work involved in
transcribing what I actually say - more than there is in saying it. The
trick is to provide tools and techniques to reduce this problem, and the
first part is to identify carefully what needs to be done. (not only is a
blank space a more useful functional text equivalent for a piece of
decoration, it is a lot faster to write <grin />).

These people have a genuine concern, and we need to find ways of addressing
it. I think there are ways of doing so, and if we understand the problem and
the range of soilutions better (in more detail) then we can produce more
efficient guidance to more efficient ways of solving it.

JS
  I'm not sure 3.4 is appropriate for all web sites, or all content. We can't
  swing it with the WCAG 2.0, so I am *very* uncomfortable including it. If
  this group can't make it work with the requirement specifying it, I cannot
  put my vote behind its inclusion.

CMN

Except that

  (1) it hasn't been shown that we can't do it. I am inclined to believe we
  can. It took me about 90 minutes to provide a graphic equivalent and 10
  minutes to provide a sound equivalent of some kind for one checkpoint (I
  had to learn to use two recording tools, and I am not a graphic designer,
  and I wanted to work from scratch for copyright reasons. There are
  clip-art libraries available that would have allowed me to do it in about
  5 minutes, but I don't have the tools that they work with - for example
  powerpoint or Word, neither of which is rare.

  (2) It is not yet clear that this requirement would apply to WCAG 2.0 if it
  were more specific than the current text, or even applying the current
  success criteria.

[snipped to the "afterword" bit]

  This leads me to believe we may find more common ground and a solution we're
  happier about if we opt for a list of reasons to implement this technique,
  as well as how to implement the technqiues. Is it appropriate to implement
  this on the WCAG 2.0? Maybe not - since all the supporting material and the
  WCAG 2.0 are all in text and no one has the time to implement 3.4 on the
  content.

CMN Maybe we should look for people to take action items and spend a bit of
time applying 3.4 to WCAG 2?

More seriously, yes, I think that more techniques material is critical to
finding common ground.

Cheers

Charles


[JS - this para snipped from above]
  And if we continue the logic of the WCAG 2.0, and point 3.4, we could also
  argue - with a greater sense of urgency behind it - that to be truly
  accessible the site would be in English and Chinese, since there are more
  people who can read English and Chinese than can't read text and leave with
  an understanding.

CMN Well there are probably more people who can't read english or chinese
than people who can by about 2 to 1. Compared to people who can understand a
reasonably well-constructed cartoon (note Matt is right - not all graphics is
useful - some of it fails and is merely artistically interesting) I suspect
the argument runs in favour of getting out the drawing tools.
JS
  Is it appropriate for an Internet Privacy Policy to implement this? You bet
  - only attorney's enjoy reading those <grin />. Is it appropriate for
  content geared to younger audiences or audiences that can't read? 100%.
CMN
Well, I hate reading privacy policies, but I do care where information goes.
If they could be presented as cartoons life would be a lot more pleasant.
(And there we have hope for real tools to do it for us. P3P provides a
mechanism for saying what happens, and we could use fairly simple semantic
web tools to convert that to cartoons).

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2001 18:31:53 UTC