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Edit comment LC-859 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-859
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Commenter: Joe Clark 2 <joeclark@joeclark.org>

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Resolution status:

From http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2006May/0119.html

Again after many unheeded warnings, the Working Group published the following guideline for multimedia (at the highest level):

Sign-language interpretation is provided for multimedia.

First of all, which sign language? For an English-language source, no fewer than five distinct, if not always mutually unintelligible, sign languages can be identified (American, British, Irish, Australian, New Zealand).

More importantly, WCAG now requires translating a document (a multimedia file) into another language as a claimed accessibility provision. To restate the same question I have been posing for years, what prevents a Ukrainian-speaker from demanding that a Web site be translated into Ukrainian? After all, in both cases the issue is the incomprehensibility of the language of the original, not the disability. (A deaf person is not necessarily unable to read. Deaf people can and do understand and communicate in written language. A reliance on sign language, or even a preference for it, does not logically follow from being deaf.)
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