Extremist… I am proud to wear that label. I make no apologies for drawing my line in the sand, but to be very clear to all – that is *MY* line, and not that of all those that work and live in the accessibility space that we share. For those within our community who become uncomfortable with my stance, I apologize to them for their discomfort only, but not for my stance. And for those who have written me in the past supporting my comments – thank you for your encouragement.

It’s too bad that Mr. Baron chooses to not allow responses on his blog. It is his right of course, but it allows for only one point of view, and not for dialog. He points to two recent emails I have authored as proof that my position(s) stifle ‘innovation’. However, while he goes to great lengths to discredit my position, he does absolutely nothing to advance an alternative way of ensuring that a specification emerges that delivers on an oft quoted goal of the WHAT WG: that “…accessibility just happens…” Trust me, I want that more than many can even comprehend, but if the specifications currently being drawn up do not set the stage and ensure that possibility, then that goal will simply not be met. The example of BeSpin is proof of that. As I stated in my letter, had fallback content be a mandatory design requirement for the BeSpin developers, I’m sure their creative minds and collective development experience would have found a way. But because it is only an ‘option’, they have ‘thoughts’ sitting on a shelf somewhere – maybe they will emerge, or maybe they will continue to gather dust.

Finally, in one of those postings, I made what I thought was a legitimate and compelling case for the *BUSINESS MODEL* that these Web 2.0 HTML5 web apps are seeking to address: increasingly, consumers of these tools – certainly at the enterprise level – are asking about, and being held to account for, accessibility issues. A specification that builds in these requirements as mandatory establishes a developer baseline that other aspects of society have already embraced – this is a bad thing?

So technologist such as Mr. Baron can listen, think and learn, or they can go blithely into the brave new frontier, developing web-apps with little chance of monitization – but hey, they are cool. Good luck with that.

(and Wendy, sorry for stealing your platform for my soap box)

On a slight tangent, but still relevant, is a point on Bell.

Bell actually had a profoundly negative effect on the well being of the Deaf in the late 1800′s which the community is still, to some extent, recovering from.

His family had an interesting connection to deafness in that his father and grandfather were both well regarded speech therapists and both his mother and wife were deaf – however, they never acknowledged that they were.

So deafness was something they tried to cure, rather than acknowledge and support. So much so, in fact, that in 1880, when Deaf education and all that goes with that (successful employment etc) was at its peak, he introduced an education policy on Oralism at the Milan Congress of Educators of the Deaf.

Suddenly deaf students were being taught Orally, they were forbidden to sign in school and the number of Deaf teachers dropped from 50% to 12% in 80 years. It was an absolute tradgedy that our Deaf friends are still being affected by even now, which is evident even now in lower than average literacy rates and educational success within the Deaf population.

Apologies for the long post! It’s something I’m passionate about and am speaking on at SxSW this year… so it’s all fresh in my mind

Hope to see you at CSUN and perhaps SxSW

Lisa

Or was the phrase wore *are* supposed to be *are not*?

So the problem is how do we get accessibility-sceptics to read the reasoned arguments for accessibility, like this blog post, rather than the fundamentalist arguments (of which I don’t believe there really are that many)?