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Re: Priority lists; multimedia

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Sep 3, 2002 3:44AM

At 6:01 PM -0400 9/1/02, Joe Clark wrote:
>*Allegedly*, if one fails to meet Priority 1 guidelines, large
>numbers of disabled visitors will be *unable* to use your site. Miss
>the Priority 2s? Many will have *difficulty* using your site. Lapse
>on the 3s? Some undefined number will suffer *inconvenience* using
>your site.

Right -- that is the official story on what the priorities mean. In
truth, they're highly subjective and very much related to the state of
the web in 1998.

>The priority listings are good enough, I suppose, though it's true
>that ease of implementation is not covered (accesskey and tabindex
>is very easy to implement, but they are clearly nice-to-have
>features, not necessities). The problem becomes the suggested
>remedies, which are almost farcically theoretical and divorced from
>the lived reality of Web sites not domiciled at W3.org.

Yeah, too many of the original WAI documents were based on an "if you
build it, they will come" philosophy by which really clever things were
suggested that didn't work in any known browsers at the time. This made
the WAI guidelines far less practical than they could have been, which
meant that they come across as very pie-in-the-sky. Hopefully WCAG2
will be better.

>Hang out on the various wai-* mailing lists sometime. These people
>*do not get out much*, and many accessibility techniques are merely
>words to them ("aural stylesheet," "text description") rather than
>something they can prove they've written or actually used.

Oh, be nice. :)

Thanks for the comments about multimedia accessibility, Joe -- something
I know little about myself. I am looking forward to your book.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
Next Book: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 http://cssin24hours.com
Kynn on Web Accessibility ->> http://kynn.com/+sitepoint


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