Re: professionalism and wysiwyg

At 03:53 p.m. 10/09/98 -0400, Michelle L. Kinsey-Clinton wrote:
>if I get sued for doing a site in, say, nothing but
>Flash, under the ADA... I'll countersue as a response to the attemped
>violation of my rights to freedom of expression under the First Amendment.
>And my lawyer's first assignment in the proceedings will be a motion to
>dismiss the suit as frivolous.

Was this opinion formed based on consultation with your lawyer,
or as a knee-jerk reaction to people citing the ADA?  I'm wondering
if you have any legal standing for claiming that the first
amendment (of the US Constitution -- "free speech" -- for those
who aren't Americans) provides you with a "get out of jail free
card" (a Monopoly reference) regarding the ADA.

>Here's why: I *am* capable of use of judgment with regards to the best way
>to present my material, and you can bet that in the event that I have a
>site with information that *needs* to be presented to *everybody*, for
>whatever reason, I'll make sure it's accessible.

How do you decide what things *need* to be seen by people with
disabilities, and what things they *don't need* to see?  I'm
curious what criteria you use to present this.  A number of people
who are professionals would offer the opinion that blind people
don't need to access _anything_ via the web, since, after all,
it's a visual mediu.

>See, I *am* a
>professional, and I *do* know what I am doing. So that leaves, say, my
>online personal art portfolio open to lawsuits from cranky blind people who
>think I'm oppressing them because I've not provided them a way to *hear* my
>visual artwork.

"Cranky blind people"?  Oy.

If that's what you think this is all about, then it seems to me you
are reacting with an incorrect and very bigotted view about what
web accessibility really means.

>The issue here seems to be not validation per se, but an unwillingness on
>the parts of some web site designers (the ones who used to be technical
>writers, is my guess) to first admit that not every site on the web is
>appropriate for validation, because *validation is creatively
>restrictive*---and then to allow the creators of individual sites to make
>their own judgment calls regarding the need for their projects to be
>validated.

How is validation creatively restrictive?  Can you cite an example?
(By the way, I was never a tech writer.)

Also, keep in mind that examples based on broken implementations in
current browsers -- such as the need for NAME in certain javascript
applications -- aren't really a problem with the idea of writing
correct HTML as with a bug in a particular piece of software.

Apart from hacks to get around buggy user agents, I'm at a loss to
figure out how your creative freedom is stolen via validation.  How
much is the artistic content of your online photo gallery damaged
by an intelligently chosen ALT tag, for example?  (e.g., <IMG
SRC="bckyrdkm.jpg" ALT="Kim in the Backyard">)  Does that piece of
descriptive text HURT your artistic vision more than [INLINE] does? :)


--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
Enroll now for my online stylesheets (CSS) class! http://www.hwg.org/classes/
The voice of the future?   http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html

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