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Re: thoughts from Jim Thatcher re the DoJ ANPRM

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From: Dave Katten
Date: Jan 21, 2011 2:21PM

Howdy,
Thanks to Terrill's helpful distillation, I'd have to disagree.

Let's take the first two AA criteria he list: live captions and audio
descriptions. In practice, these are often outside the scope of
development, and are part of the content creation/deployment phase. So
leaving them aside really isn't an abdication of "developers [working]
with accessibility in mind".

My concern isn't the number, but the effort involved to achieve
success. Getting captions for prerecorded content is already a
monumental task for pretty much any entity. There are questions of
vendors vs. in-house, workflow, etc. Applying that to live broadcasts
is an unreasonable burden _at this time_. If we want accessibility law
and regulations to be successful, they must be attainable within
reasonable means (typically, developer training). Live captions and
audio descriptions aren't technical achievements that can be "built
in" by a web developer, nor can they be easily or readily attained at
a reasonable cost. That's just where we are now.

That said, I certainly don't disagree that these should be recommended
practices. But the reality is that the law should constitute a minimum
- the explanation I've seen is the Level A is what you MUST do, and
level AA is what you SHOULD do, and that seems right to me. Yes, we
should do what we can to persuade the adoption of AA in practice (and
I'm sure there will be many follow ups about how useful these
techniques are), but as for what the DOJ should require, "must" seems
like the appropriate level.

Best,
Dave



On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Denis Boudreau < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> My feeling is that Mr. Thatcher (with all due respect) is ready to settle for much too less. Anyone serious enough about accessibility will agree that AA is the absolute minimum to go for if one wants to make a real difference. The problem is not the number of success criteria. The problem is the lack of interest from developers to work with accessibility in mind. If the government can't make a stand on the appropriate level of conformance to ensure an inclusive society where every citizen has a fair chance to contribute according to his or her own potential, I wonder who will...
>
> /Denis
>
>
>
> On 2011-01-21, at 3:20 PM, Terrill Thompson wrote:
>
>> Jim Thatcher recommends that the DOJ require only Level A WCAG 2.0 success criteria (plus one Level AA criterion, related to visible focus for keyboard users). His argument is that "level AA is too strong, too complicated, too much." His response lists all the Level A success criteria in order to reinforce that these are enough (there are 26 of them).
>>
>> However, we should also consider the thirteen Level AA  success criteria - these are the ones that would *not* be required if the ADA only require Level AA.
>>
>> I've created a paraphrased list of them all here:  http://bit.ly/h7iKGU
>>
>> If you have an opinion as to how strong the ADA requirements should be, you only have until Monday (January 24) to let the DOJ know! Here are instructions for submitting a comment:
>> http://www.ada.gov/anprm2010/anprm2010_comment.htm
>>
>> Terrill Thompson
>> Technology Accessibility Specialist, University of Washington
>>
>>