Hi Richard, To play the devil's advocate...
Certainly humanist developers aim to remove the barriers that technology might place between users and content. However, difficulty arises when determining what constitutes 'technical' literacy. This could range from 'What's a link' through to 'How do I increase/decrease text size'. Even many of the 'hooks' put into content markup to make it more accessible are not used by a screen reader unless the user customises the behaviour of the software (reading title attributes for one). The issue of determining prior (technical) knowledge is one of those bug-bears like browser statistics. Even though we'd like to, it's problematic to generalise. On the other hand, adding an introduction to every webpage on how to use the web is equally untenable. Incidentally, does anyone know of a formal public-school curriculum that covers using the web? Such a document/documents might provide an insight as to how we (as in society-at-large) currently qualify 'technical literacy'. >I think it's important to NOT expect users to know how to do this or even be >vaguely technically literate. >Doctors, for example, shouldn't have to be IT experts. They fix people not >machines. It's simply not their job or responsibility to be forced to learn >the HUGE amount of stuff that as developers we've crammed into our head. This >doesn't mean they should be penaliseed and not allowed to see web sites or >interact as freely on the web as the rest of us. -- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director Motive | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
