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Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)

From: Iain Harrison
Date: Fri, Oct 22 2004 2:41PM
Subject: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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Friday, October 22, 2004, 3:38:56 PM, andrew.arch85 wrote:

> Even with Standards logos (eg XHTML / CSS) you'd better have a very good QA
> system to ensure gremlins don't creep in next week when someone else
> modifies the pages.

That's part of the point of the icons - you can just click the icon
to do a validation check. That ought to be part of the process of
publishing a page.


--

Iain

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Fri, Oct 22 2004 2:52PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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> That's part of the point of the icons - you can just click the icon
> to do a validation check. That ought to be part of the process of
> publishing a page.

So should spell checking, but adding a link to a spell checker would be just
as odd as a link to the validator. It doesn't make much sense in the context
of what end-users would want/need when visiting the page.

-Darrel

From: Raena Armitage
Date: Fri, Oct 22 2004 3:11PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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On 23 Oct 2004, at 7:36 am, iain wrote:

> That's part of the point of the icons - you can just click the icon
> to do a validation check. That ought to be part of the process of
> publishing a page.

In most cases (ie, non-personal sites) I really don't see a reason for
the end user to need to see a button. For our own convenience there's
any number of nifty bookmarks you can use to send the page to the
validator of your choice.

From: Andrew Arch
Date: Fri, Oct 22 2004 10:53PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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Yes - but how many people put the logo on every page? Yet most would claim
that it applies to the whole site. And do all the site authors validate
before publishing? Our experience with accessibility testing is that very
few do (even if they have the logos).

Andrew

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Mon, Oct 25 2004 12:24PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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>> I've not heard these arguments against putting accessibility icons on
>> home pages before.

> Then I think I need to refer to the treatise
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html#icon
> which explains why they, as well HTML validity and CSS "validity" icons
> are much worse than useless.

Thanks for the link, Jukka. Much food for thought. I haven't thought
through the issues your raise in this way before so that's helpful to read.
You make some strong arguments (and make them stridently!), though I'm not
100% convinced yet.

Couple quick counterpoints/questions:

> There is no web accessibility standard, and even as a loose
> recommendation, WCAG 1.0 is partly outdated -

Well, okay so it's not a "standard" in the sense of the ISO standards or
DTD's, but isn't it the closest thing to a standard that we've got? Aside
from the semantics of it, the WCAG and Bobby are the two best-recognized
icons currently used to represent or claim something about web
accessibility. If that's the choice, then I prefer the WCAG.

> And mysterious and misunderstood icons add to the confusion. So
> does the general confusion between accessibility, WCAG 1.0
> conformance, and passing some tests (like Bobby). Three different
> things. If you equate any two of them, you have missed something
> very fundamental in accessibility.

I think I understand well enough the difference between the W3C WCAG, HTML
validity icons, and Bobby, though I am sure that I'm still learning some of
the nuances with some of these things. But while they are all certainly
different things, they all can, broadly speaking, be said to relate to
accessibility. I'm in favour of picking ONE logo (or one connected system
of logos) related to accessibility and promoting it. Regardless of whether
it's a conformance icon, or a validity stamp, or a test-passing stamp.

I guess the _clearest and simplest_ method to deal with accessibility
statements or claims would be to use an Accessibility Statement, but is
there no role for a graphic symbol? It seems it should have a role
alongside the work done by the text of an Accessibility Statement. As far
as promotional/propaganda activities go, an icon/symbol/logo usually
improves the effectiveness and visibility of the marketing strategy doesn't
it?

In the article you argue, quite correctly I think, that the icon for the
WCAG is not very good - it is not culturally neutral and the letters WCAG
mean nothing on their own so the icon fails as a symbol in that sense. But
I guess I see it as the most widely accepted logo, regardless of its
weaknesses. I would argue in favour of changing the logo, but until that
happens and it is accepted generally, then the current W3C WCAG logo has the
advantage of being widespread and "officially" identified with the W3C.

My thinking up till now has been that it would be worthwhile trying to teach
people what W3C and the WCAG stand for. Maybe I need to rethink this, but
whether people misunderstand what the WCAG is or what the icons mean is not
so important to me as getting people to know that there is such a thing as
WCAG. Further understanding can come later. I don't feel bad about
"misleading" them by putting a logo on a site in the way you suggest in the
article (at least not yet!). I would feel bad about putting an icon on one
of my webpages which turned out to be a false claim of compliance, but I
don't see that as the end of the world, either -- I would hope that someone
who knew better would correct me or that a user who had difficulties with
the site would correct me. None of it is going to be perfect, and I don't
expect that all sites that use the icon will use it perfectly. I'm not sure
if it would bother me to know that as many as 75% of sites probably misuse
the icon. It is self-regulating and until many, many more sites use it,
there will be wide variation in the way the icon is implemented. I suppose
that by the time a "web accessibility"-related icon has achieved such deep
penetration into the market that it is generally understood and more or less
accurately used, the whole purpose of the icon as a disability-awareness
tool would be no longer needed, so I don't see the use of such compliance
icons lasting more than 5 more years as a web trend. That will also depend
on how quickly web development and content management system software become
standards compliant with respect to the HTML/XHTML/XML they produce.

I see the raising awareness and education as processes that take time:
people will go through different stages of understanding. And different
people will be interested to different degrees. I learned about the WCAG by
becoming curious about the WCAG icons. Maybe that is just a phase in the
development of web accessibility skills, but I find it a lot harder to
encourage web accessibility without having recourse to some kind of
guidelines to point to. And the WCAG seem the most legitimate to me,
despite various problems.

I will mull over the issues you raise in the article a bit more this week
and see if I can put anything more cogent down in response.

Phil.

*****************************************************
Philip Kiff
Networking & Information Consultant
New Brunswick Easter Seal March of Dimes

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mon, Oct 25 2004 3:55PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?
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On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, chnnb wrote:

> > There is no web accessibility standard, and even as a loose
> > recommendation, WCAG 1.0 is partly outdated -
>
> Well, okay so it's not a "standard" in the sense of the ISO standards or
> DTD's, but isn't it the closest thing to a standard that we've got?

Who knows? It depends on how you measure distance. The point is that
standards are exact specifications, so that you can objectively decide
whether something complies with a standard or not. (And from the formal
standpoint, the W3C doesn't even claim to be a standards body; it is an
industry consortium.)

_Some_ entries in WCAG 1.0 would be suitable for inclusion into a
standard, at least if properly clarified. Many entries would not. This is
one of the key problems with WCAG 1.0, especially since there have been
many attempts to present it as standard and to use it as one. Don't get me
wrong: the items that are _not_ of the kind we have in standards may well
be more important than those that are. But if, for example, some authority
wishes to _enforce_ accessibility rules, it needs to do quite some
selection instead of just requiring conformance to WCAG 1.0. (And the
"levels" or "priorities" in WCAG 1.0 are of no help here; in fact they
mostly confuse people.)

> I'm in favour of picking ONE logo (or one connected system
> of logos) related to accessibility and promoting it. Regardless of whether
> it's a conformance icon, or a validity stamp, or a test-passing stamp.

But what makes you think such icons would be useful? And you cannot really
ignore the fact that the existing icons _have_ been used conformance
icons and validity stamps - that is, the existing recognized meanings, if
they exist, are plain _wrong_.

> I guess the _clearest and simplest_ method to deal with accessibility
> statements or claims would be to use an Accessibility Statement, but is
> there no role for a graphic symbol?

Not unless you can give it a well-defined meaning and make people see it
that way. Rather unrealistic, I'm afraid.

_Specific_ accessibility symbols might be useful in some situations, but
only if they provide a useful way of distinguishing between, say, pages
that are suitable for use without a mouse and pages about which might or
might not be useable that way. Since the vast majority of the billions of
pages around make no claim (or refutation) about being keyboard-only
accessible, what would be the point of making such a claim about a dozen
or so pages? If the claim were part of formalized metadata, or otherwise
presented in a machine-recognizable way, we might at least _hope_ that
search engines will some day allow users to search for such pages
specifically, or give them bigger weight in results.

> In the article you argue, quite correctly I think, that the icon for the
> WCAG is not very good - it is not culturally neutral and the letters WCAG
> mean nothing on their own so the icon fails as a symbol in that sense. But
> I guess I see it as the most widely accepted logo, regardless of its
> weaknesses.

It's still unknown to most people, and, maybe worse, misunderstood by the
rest.

> My thinking up till now has been that it would be worthwhile trying to teach
> people what W3C and the WCAG stand for.

I don't think so. It's useful to tell _authors_ about them. But on most
pages, most of the readers are not authors. Besides, WCAG is just a
technical recommendation. The first thing that authors should understand
is the concept and meaning of accessibility, not a set of rules
constructed to help in achieving accessibility.

> - - I don't
> expect that all sites that use the icon will use it perfectly.

I know that none of them use it justly.

It's not about perfection. Either you comply with some rules or you don't.
If the rules themselves require perfection (such as clearest language
possible), then there's little justification in claiming conformance if
you don't think you have achieved perfection.

To raise awareness, and maybe to inform people, you could use icons that
are essentially graphic (unlike the WCAG icon, which is just stylicized
letters) and intuitively understandable - like a wheelchair symbol, or
hands signifying sign language, or a white stick and a dog. And you could
then explain what you mean by them in detail, without having to consider
any compliance to a fixed set of rules. You could just express your
serious _intent_ to be accessible, and explain some measures taken to achieve that.

But icons are often hard to decide. What symbol would we use for
accessibility to mentally retarted people, or people with motoric
disabilities, or people with dyslexia? I think it's mainly up to the
communities of and for people with a specific disability to construct, if
possible, universally understandable symbol for the disability or, rather,
for measures to deal with it.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/