RE: the market hasn't spoken - it hasn't bothered to listened

I agree with accessibility, but then I also agree with good business
practise.

And it is good business practise to appeal to the majority rather than the
minority.

Yes we shouldn't discriminate, but then we shouldn't discriminate against
able bodied users just for the minority.

For example - my sailing club recently shut down because it couldn't afford
to comply with the disability requirements, we couldn't provide disabled
access to the sailing dinghy, and couldn't afford to. Now whilst disabled
people do do sailing, we have no disabled members, and none have ever
visited or made an effort to find out about the club. Yet the club was
shut-down because of it.

I suppose my point is everyone knows what they should do now days, and it
can in most cases be done without affecting the majority of users, but in
the rare cases where accessibility would make an object less desirable for
able-bodied people, we should stick with the majority of internet users -
rather than turning it into something accessible just so one or two people
can view it perhaps, sometimes, maybe not, never.

Basically yea accessibility is great, and its the moral thing to do, but as
a web developer, to cut to the chase, I'm here to make money, yes the moral
thing is great and yes 100% of my websites are accessible, but I wouldn't
ruin the experience for an able-bodied users, because they make up the
largest percentage of internet users. And its the right thing to do, but we
need to draw limitations.

Anyway just felt like an early morning rant, no doubt I'm going to get
blasted for posting this.



-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Philip TAYLOR
Sent: 28 June 2007 09:24
To: Lachlan Hunt
Cc: HTML WG
Subject: Re: the market hasn't spoken - it hasn't bothered to listened





Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> BTW, DVDs don't get sold with books describing the entire film for those 
> who can't watch it.  They do, however, get produced with captions, 
> subtitles and sometimes audio descriptions.  Why should video on the web 
> be any different?

We not discussing video on the web : we are discussing video
embedded in a web page, which is very different.  If we were
discussing video on the web, as professional video producers,
then I have no doubt that good accessibility practice would
guide our adoption of audio description, closed captions and
whatever.  But we are not : rather, we are discussing taking
video that (almost certainly) someone else has produced, and
embedding it in a web page for which we are responsible.  At
that point, the accessibility issues become /our/ concern,
and it is incumbent on us to ensure that such web pages are
maximally accessible, (a) because it will help to ensure
equal access for all, and (b) because it is a legal requirement
in much of the world.  Therefore I support those who advocate
ensuring that a textual (or aural, or braille, or whatever)
description of a /summary/ of the video content be required
as an child-element or attribute of whatever element is used
to embed the video.

Philip Taylor


This message has been scanned for viruses by Viatel MailControl - http://viatel.mailcontrol.com/

Received on Thursday, 28 June 2007 09:52:56 UTC