The material that comprises this page has been excerpted from a thread on WEBWATCH-L with the permission of the authors.
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 07:17:08 -0700
From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
To: webwatch-l@teleport.com
Subject: webwatch-l AVA
Since attending the World Wide Web Conference in Santa Clara a couple months ago at which the Web Access Initiative and other stuff relating to accessibility were central topics I have been, along with most members of this list trying to find a more widespread tactic to assure that we reach the groups Al Gilman so rightly has pointed out need reaching if we are to make an impact on usability of the internet.
Although I have a penchant for pointing out the most militant (abrasive?) strategies I am aware that promises of lawsuits, sitins or various simulations of bomb-throwing are clearly last-ditch strategies that are essentially useless except as implied threats for future action when reason fails. Most people posting to the web probably want to assure that their sites are accessible and when I refer to the need for "Web Police" I generally mean for us to be the "good cops" who try to gain compliance through cooperation rather than pointing out that inaccessible websites will be deemed illegal and actionable - much more so than, say, pornography because we are not trying to censor content but to assure proper form, much as if we were trying to assure that web postings be free of viruses.
The proposal is that we organize an "Accessibility Volunteer Alliance" to make it simple for people with limited computer expertise to help in the overwhelming task of notifying the millions of inaccessible sites about how to make their offerings acceptable to our community. We don't need YASA (yet another seal of approval) because many sites already look like Indy racers with all the "This site best viewed with..." or speech friendly logos, etc. We need *SIMPLE* software that furnishes boiler plate references to guidelines and encouragements to join our efforts. When Kelly got the senator to modify his site it took a bunch of phone calls and quite a bit of hands-on work. When Greg Rosmaita takes on a webmaster he not only points out html and accessibility flaws, he also even writes their code for them and takes them through a short intro to writing good html. This is wonderful but to reach millions of offenders without using up all their talents (not to mention time), I am hoping we can develop a strategy that will enable anybody who finds an inaccessible site to perform an effective preliminary notification that will often do the job.
My "first cut" approach is to "GET" the site via the email order mentioned earlier, forward that to the webmaster with a "canned" note to the effect that we are trying to help them in their undoubted effort to reacy everyone with their posting. My skills in designing such a "program" or its associated boiler plate are beyond rusty, so I thought that as a group we could come up with some useful filter to preclude Greg's having to write 200,000,000 lines of code! The task is similar to the familiar one of having a form letter to send to your congressperson only in this case sending the same one to many targets makes it unnecessary to modify the text since each recipient is likely to receive it from only one source - the AVA.
So I guess we need ideas on how (or if) this could be done. Ideally
there would be a few levels of notification and the list could contain a
means for any of us "web cops" to simply send in a webmaster's email
address and sending her a nice message and suggestions. Short of
Spamming but beyond "your site needs help." There could be a time
delayed re-check and increasing level of notification pressure all the
way through a "warrant" to the lawyers
Any takers?
--
Love.
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 11:21:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
Subject: webwatch-l Getting AVA organized
I want to thank Love for framing the issue so well. He inspired me to attempt action. I launched into a grandiose whitepaper; that process stalled.
Let me drop back and offer the following bag of tidbits:
I referred to what the wheelchair users had accomplished confronting Froggy's in Pittsburgh. You can read more about this by Webbing to
http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/and searching for "Froggy".
Kathleen Kleinmann is the director of an Independent Living Center in Washington, PA and Secretary of NCIL. She is a seasoned leader in battle in the defence of access rights. She has agreed in principle to work with or advise us. I view her as a valuable coach and "Outside Director."
Marion Metcalf is working on a letter to the Oak Ridger, her home-town newspaper. She is a senior policy analyst working in the enforcement of Immigration laws. She is familiar with the development process for civil fine and criminal cases. She will share the letter when it is done, if not sooner. She is also interested in working on groups whose mission would suggest they would care, such as the ACLU.
I have accepted an action item from the WAI Working Group dealing with CSS. I will be using
http://www.access.digex.net/%7Easgilman/web-access/
to expose drafts and will send tickles to webwatch at strategic moments asking for you to comment or help me find those who can.
Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation has a program for site evaluation. I don't know how good its output is. It may take a skilled soothsayer to review its output, much as with WebLint. Has anyone worked with this tool? Would anyone be willing to explore on what terms they would apply it; can we make this a resource we can rely on?
The DIMENET project combines some tantalizing features: Integrating concerns across disabilities, a multi-function office suite that is highly accessible, integrated community communication and information promulgation to the Web. See http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/ for example. If we wanted a searchable cache of past correspondence, for example, they have the infrastructure in place to support this.
The various forms of "see your page in Lynx" service seem to be an effective way to reach people with the message that one browser does not define how their message comes accross over the Web. The Web by mail service that inspired Love is another similar resource. The Trace Center has a link to some sort of a Web by phone capability. Has anyone used this? This sounds like a valuable tool analogous to what the Lynx based services accomplish.
I think that what cases such as ABC and AudioNet need is for a team to be detailed to address that case. Pam needs not to be alone, but it doesn't take all of us to work on next steps. We should identify who will work on a given case, and when they should report back -- defined in terms of progress milestones and/or time.
In general, I think that we volunteers are missing a resource in our jealousy of the professionals. There are organizations active advocating for disabled rights. I have mentioned the example of the YRIF tool but this also goes for the AFB et_al. These organizations have budgets and lawyers. They may lack Web Smarts comparable to what is present on this list. How can we develop a way of working with them that is a win for both?
I will copy Kathleen and Marion on this (separately).
I plan to write a more coherent overview of "L'affaire Froggy." I will let y'all know when that is available.
I will notify webwatch when I have produced anything on my WAI action item.Pam, for AudioNet, would you please choose which you want to work on first:
...then maybe we can get a buddy signed up to work with you.
Let me get off the mike and let others comment.
--
Al Gilman
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 16:19:00 -0700
From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
Subject: webwatch-l AVA
Although the "legal" approach is of course a last ditch alternative it might be cited that President Clinton has made it clear that accessibility is important and that the intent and spirit (and probably the letter) of the various communications laws make it incumbent on content providers to comply with accessibility guidelines.
Although the WAI of the W3C and the latter's proposed PICS, which is designed to more or less require access compliance, hold promise of being of great help in our effort, we cannot depend on that.
Another important function of Volunteers is to assure that such things as ALT tags are not simply present but useful. It is conceivable that one could put "xxxxxxxxx" in the tags, thus fooling the automated requirement for a tag without being of any use.
--
Love.
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 21:54:37 -0700
From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
Subject: webwatch-l AVA
The discussions about "what constitutes accessibility?" have been interesting and the suggestions for how to modify Lynx and "mainline" browsers which are to be used with screen readers are informative - I hope they are even better covered on basr-l which is more suited for those ruminations.
HOWEVER: accessibility is of course in the mind of the accessor who then assesses whether it is accessible with whatever method she uses, down to and beyond the email version obtained with the "GET" command.
I would hope that someone who wants to take part in "webwatching" with a view to improving accessibility need not be trained to the level of Al, Greg, or Kelly before they can participate by having some sort of form that they can use to initiate interest with a site author whose site is of interest to the webwatcher and said author being open to suggestions as is often stated: "please send comments about this site to..." with a mailto: thingie.
Ultimately we webwatchers will acquire knowledge of html, cascading
style sheets, c++, object orientation, and the inner workings of server
hardware but meanwhile if we could just have some way to notify content
providers that they're not providing us with any usable content and
ultimately that they are going to be held legally responsible for that
(of course this is a last resort and we don't want to pose idle
threats). I think that people who point out sites to the list could
feel more participative if they didn't just say "please Mr. Expert,
figure out why the site at "URL" sucks?" Sort of like parawebbers who
take the symptoms and intitiate contact so that Dr. HTML can jump in
only if needed.
--
Love.
Yes, a faq to point them to with a polite prewritten note would be good. you could plug their email address into a special url and it could be completely anonymous as far as you were concerned if that was your wish. watch out for the spam though.
Hands-On-Technolog(eye)s
touching the internet
voice: 1-(301) 949-7599
<poehlman@clark.net>
ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/poehlman
http://www.clark.net/pub/poehlman
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 15:32:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net
Subject: webwatch-l AVA continued
I have another role or task for [hopefully a larger network of volunteers].
This is to offload Gregory of some of the training burden when the answer in the WAI guidelines is "get used to it." [I exaggerate.]
The specific example is this one-link-per-line notion.
Some [beginning, low-computer-awareness] users get confused because they fail to discriminate links which are embedded in prose paragraphs and more than one link falls on a line.
Even if the WAI is so rash as to adopt this rule in a set of guidelines, it is unlikely to be followed. I won't list the quotes here, but I hope you know what I mean.
At BLYNX, Gregory is already saying "Stop, before you read any of this, do you know to have NUMBER_LINKS on? If you don't have that running, before you read anything else, ..."
But the people who need to be told this are out there lost on the Internet, not reading BLYNX. Are there other things that can be done in terms of user support?
I believe that we could work around the dumbness of the screen reader input interface via personalization of the terminal characteristics that instruct Lynx and punctuation pronunciation dictionaries that instruct the screen reader. This is tedious because different screen readers are not the same and different operating systems have different variations of terminal-capability description services.
But the Internet is an excellent way to gather up all this information.
Is this the sort of project that a network of organizations such as the VICUG-NY would support?
Incidentally, if the idea is that we are not doing all this work, where are the volunteers coming from?
Lest this sound too negative, I actually think that I have an idea that makes blind/blind peer help work. This is that primary help requests are redistributed via a revolving, not a broadcast, protocol. We would have a procmail or equivalent mailbot that would receive [open posting] help or complaint requests and it would resend the mail to N (low integer) of the enrolled help volunteers. At that point the mailbot would index down the list of volunteers so that the next message got sent to the next N volunteers, etc. Help replies would be passed back through the server which would redistribute them to recipients of the original message, or else the Reply-to: would be set to accomplish a "reply to all recipients + file."
Helpers would get all correspondence on cases that they touch, but not have their inboxes loaded with lots of messages about other requests.
The second-tier support personnel would receive a second-tier list that is closed-posting and one must be an enrolled volunteer to post to. This list has a larger "post permission" list than a "distribute copies" list. All players can read the answers in the Webbed file of past correspondence. But only the insiders have the skill and/or organization to do that systematically.
Help requests have to be interpreted very broadly. The true novices making requests on the system will not be able to articulate a very precise request. But draft letters of complaint including BOBBY reports or whatever would fall under the class of help requests welcomed for review into the peer-coaching process.
Enough blather for one message.
--
Al Gilman