Friday, July 27, 2007

Disheartening as H.. :: ADA, on your 17th Anniversary, meet Reality.. Sigh..

Hopefully this comes out right.. My gray cells aren't functioning so well at all again today.. :(

PS, by the way.. Everyone with a Yahoo! group needs to please check your spam buckets.. My copy of this to you all from my desktop never made it to the lists.. Next post: The Conspiracy behind effective advocacy posts regularly finding themselves being thrown down the cyber incinerator.. :wink:

Now, about yesterday's 17th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the real Reality of the human factor behind seeking any kind of accessibility accommodations.....

Don't know why I looked at an email bearing a subject referencing a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) IRC chat log yesterday, but I did.. Guess I'm glad I did.. Ran off at the fingertips at first glance, too..

The email was a cross-post to several W3C-associated working (wg) or interest group (ig) listservs.. It was about the most recent realtime talk some members had very literally regarding rewriting how we all design our web page coding so that the Internet is accessible for absolutely everyone..

The email I responded to was by a "Joshue O'Connor" who caught what my mind just completely did not grasp on the first run through of the IRC archive.. What caught my eye most from Joshue's now archived post (w3c-wai-ig, public-html) was the following:

This section is frankly kind of amazing. In several fell swoops the entire efforts of the accessibility people on the list are dismissed as almost Pavlovian responses and then an absurd dialogue about smell-o-vision ensues. This is trivializing the efforts of people here who are concerned about the needs of people with disabilities.

He was commenting on the following block from the log:

# # [15:01] This is orthogonal to fallback/alt content for images, though

# # [15:05] oh well, the legal stick of accessibility has been waived again :-/

# # [15:05] why is it that when accessibility advocates can't come up with a rational argument, they always fall back to the legal stick?

# # [15:08] Well, maybe they realize there are no carrots available?

# # [15:25] If the Web had smell-o-vision, would accessibility advocates fight for longdescs of odors on behalf of those with no sense of smell?

# # [15:27] A perfume site that made use of smell-o-vision would probably provide a description of the smell anyway for all users, so they can know what it's like before sampling.

To put it into some kind of perspective, these are the folks, among others, who are re-creating THE Internet for the rest of us'ns.. My no-regrets and also now archived (w3c-wai-ig, public-html) response was:

More amazing to these fingertips is that this became publicly disclosed, surfaced today, July 26, 2007, the 17th Anniversary of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act..

Obviously a long, long way to go before those who seek universal access for *ALL* are not publicly ridiculed by others..

Peace and best wishes..

Cindy Sue

If you've a mind to, please have at it.. These sentiments were left literally for the World Wide Web to meander regarding the acceptance of universal accessibility, let alone the actual implementation of the same..

Ever.........

To those who participated to this level in that chat, do you all honestly think this is what Tim Berners-Lee wants associated with his vision of Reinventing HTML towards a New Net..?

Very personal to Tim.. Please tell me from the bottom of your most visionist of visionary Hearts this isn't..

Cyber hugs..

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