I agree with both of these comments.
The way I see it its fine for testers to provide
skills and resources (not content) that may not be
available to all but what has been measured and how
has to be open and transparent
and therefore open to someone to believe or not and to
trust or not. Let me introduce an analogue because
I can make many points with it.
The whole scenario reminds me of the provision of
adaptations of road systems to facilitate cycling.
This is also often post-fact adaptation (because
most design has been only for cars). Different
contexts need different solutions - for example
the solution to provide for cycling on a quiet
housing estate (such as traffic-calming) may be
quite different from say a major inter-urban
fast heavily-trafficked road (which *may* be best
served with a separate cycle-path), which may
be different again from what is needed for
cycling in urban traffic or in a pedestrianised
area. So all these situations require different
solutions. Some situations its easy to provide
ONE universal solution for. Others. such as
cycling in urban traffic may require different
solutions for different circumstances, such
as different times of day, different levels
of cycling expertise, different cycles and so on.
There may be off-road AND on-road facilities for
example, allowing users of different experience
to choose which they will use. Or the traffic
may be so snarled up that a cyclist that usually
uses the road has to find another way around the cars.
There are very useful design standards and applying
them is a skilled job and may need different people
in different circumstances - the traffic engineers,
the road builders, the sign designers - all of
these things there are open standards for. Would
anyone suggest that these standards and their use
in application to any situation be something that
is hidden away so that people who use facilities
cannot influence what is provided ? That would
be ridiculous and very clearly only serve
the needs of the designers and it wouldn't do that
very well either.
And as life depends on it - who will we trust ?
I suspect the ones that have open, good quality standards
that we can judge and decide at usage time which is best.
Sorry, I know this is a different domain but the parallels
are obvious. NOBODY argues for proprietary standards and
covert application of them where safety is involved and
those who do with web access I think have suspect motives
in my mind at least.
andy
> I agree Liddy.
>
> I also feel that some users *may* trust resources that have been verified by
> an independent third party, 'self-labelled' sites are not trusted by
> everyone all of the time. Similar to what you said; trust is like beauty;
> it's in the eye of the beholder - you should see my slide for this statement
> ;)
>
> Search engines and browsers *may* want to make use of trusted metadata.
> Segala is co-editor of the MWI mobileOK document with Google and ICRA -
> there is a use case for metadata that has been verified by an independent
> 'certification provider'. Users will make up their own minds as to whether
> they trust CAs over self-labelled sites. The idea is to support both and not
> mandate either.
>
> Let's not beat the CAs who have built trust slowly within their communities
> - I know this wasn't/isn't intended.
>
> Paul
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: DCMI Accessibility Group
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Liddy Nevile
> Sent: 27 May 2006 08:08
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: certification program
>
> Sadly, I think we will not 'get it right' no matter what
> we do, but we should be very careful.
>
> 1. The 'test-the-tester' approach has to be flawed in
> exactly the same way as the simple 'test-the-resource'
> approach is flawed - either way it is just as easy to cheat.
>
> 2. We know from experience that people decide for
> themselves who and what to trust. It is very important to
> be able to say by whom, using what tests, and when
> something was tested.
>
> 3. It is also important to say exactly what was tested -
> the components of the resource, the resource as a
> composite object, this or that version or, if you like,
> which instantiation of the resource, etc..
>
> 4. We have enough research to show that testing does not
> and cannot guarantee accessibility to everyone.
>
> and, what is compelling for me,
>
> 5. any individual user only wants to know if the resource
> will be accessible to them at the time of delivery.
>
> We have recommended the AccessForAll approach in favour
> of generalised testing for certification because that
> way, the description of the resource is available for
> decision-making.
>
> This list, beyond all others, should have many on it who
> understand why we use metadata, and they should be able
> to contribute to how and why metadata is useful in this
> context. The credibility of the metadata is important but
> so is the content. Specific details are often needed for
> accessibility decision-making. If there are too few
> details, people who could use resources will miss out on
> them and if there is too much demanded, nobody will
> bother to supply it. These are the sorts of problems
> that have been at the heart of our work for the last few years.
>
> I'd like to think that we can do, as we have always tried
> to do, and combine the use of metadata to convey
> information ABOUT the resource, basing the statements
> that make up that metadata on the tests that W3C so
> carefully develops. In my humble opinion, this does not
> lead to a 'let's certify' approach so much as a 'let's
> describe' approach.
>
> Surely we want to empower the user to make the important
> decisions about what they can/will tolerate just as, when
> we choose a hard-to- get-into restaurant, we let our
> colleagues in wheel-chairs decide to join us or not: it
> should be their decision, not ours.
>
> Liddy
>
>
>
--
andy
___________________
Andy Heath
http://axelrod.plus.com
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