Re: XFO Mapping...

[Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> The idea was however raised of mapping XFOs to an accesibility standard,
> and I thought might this not be useful in general for XFOs to be able to
> do...
> 
> <xsl:block map="apo:speech">
>      ...
> </xsl:block>

This is more or less the idea proposed by James Tauber. It's a good one
but it doesn't invalidate the need for inherently accessible FOs.

> You see, I believe that designers should address arual presentation as a
> design in and of itself (I intend to), simply degrading I believe to be the
> lazy option, and doesn't truly address the needs of the audience. 

I don't think anyone disagrees. Most human beings are lazy. Here's where
we disagree, I believe that it is the responsibility of standardizers to
take that laziness into consideration.

When an OS designer goes about making their OS accessible, they take two
separate paths:

 * they invent entirely new APIs (e.g. speech plugin APIs) for those
developers willing to go the extra mile to make their applications
accessible.

 * they reorganize their existing APIs so that accessibility can happen to
some extent "automatically." E.g. they provide non-visual ways of
accessing menus, they provide ways of increasing the system font globally
and so forth.

I think that those two strategies are equally important. 

You seem intent on deprecating the second route. According to your logic,
dialog boxes designed for sighted people are not optimized for blind
people and thus should not be available to them. Do you think that blind
people would prefer to depend on the goodwill of application designers to
completely rethink their interfaces in terms of sound or do you expect
that they would appreciate whatever features Microsoft provides to make
them accessible "by default"?

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

The first three Noble Truths of Python:
  All that is not Python is suffering.
  The origin of suffering lies in the use of not-Python.
  The cessation of suffering can be achieved by not using not-Python.
http://www.pauahtun.org/4nobletruthsofpython.html


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