*sheepish grin* and sorry for taking us pretty well off-topic.
Joe
On Jul 21, 2006, at 5:32 AM, Kafka's Daytime wrote:
Seek to design something "universally," and all the individual
skill goes out. However you end up with the idea at least that
the universal should apply. It is kind of like the insane idea
that "everyone uses jaws," so if it works with it, it works for
everyone." or everyone reads braille etc.
There might be some misunderstanding about what Universal Design is
or is intended to be.
For a start, here is the Wikipedia entry for Universal Design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Design
I was referring to Universal Design when I (less than precisely)
used the word "universal".
Will google use this as an excuse to remove their really
accessible text options, because a small and highly
individualized sample of this indeed very diverse group of
individuals said it worked for them in windows?
IMO, not at all likely. The folks at Google understand web
accessibility (and the power of simplicity). This won't likely have
any impact on the best authoring practices for accessibility which
are well-documented/standardized. I think we might be predicting
outcomes that don't really have much at all to do with how the
experimental tool is or is intended to be used. If Google stops
caring about accessibility it won't likely have much or anything to
do with this accessible search tool. Further, it's well understood
that any search engine results are not hard science...search
algorithms are always being tweaked and one always knows that it
takes a discerning human to separate the wheat from the chaff, as
it were. That applies with the accessibility results as much as it
does with the general Google search results. Let's not make this
into something that it's not. No unnecessary FUD (Fear Uncertainty
Doubt).
Also, this is not the first attempt to automate the process of
evaluating the accessibility of web pages (though it's probably the
first piggybacked on a search engine service).
My .02,
Joe
