Re: Should we consider factors other than accessibility [was Textual Images vs. Styled Text

At 5:11 PM -0500 11/29/00, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>It is not the remit of this group (or any W3C group) to determine what
>particular people who have to design web pages for a living actually do.
[...]
>At the Web Accessibility Summit held in Australia recently, co-sponsored by
>the W3C Australian Office, the Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights
>(disability), Graham Innes, said that the Commission's view was simple: use
>the WCAG guidelines.

Do you think it would be acceptable for someone to openly claim that
WCAG (1.0, 2.0, whatever) should _not_ be used in this matter, as
a set of guidelines for web accessibility?

In other words, would there be any great uproar from the crowd if I
were to publish an open letter stating "Web Designer Should Not Use
WCAG" and created a set of checkpoints which include a subset of
"practical" guidelines instead of "accessibility definitions"?

Would it be acceptable for me to publish this on the HTML Writers
Guild site, on web designer websites, in articles and columns, in
magazines and books?

Because, by saying "we are not here to say what people should do, only
to define accessibility," that's what we are asking for someone else
to do.  Would you be fine with this splintering of the community
based on the fact that WCAG is not meant as a usable resource but
rather as a theoretical definition of accessibility?

The example above, from the Commission -- "use the WCAG guidelines" --
is clearly _not_ how a theoretical definition of accessibility is
meant to be used.  Is WAI willing to actively work to prevent these
types of misuse of the WCAG document, by people (such as the Commission)
who misinterpret the Guidelines as a reasonable plan for making web
sites more accessible?

--Kynn


-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2000 17:37:39 UTC