RE: draft-ietf-pkix-logotypes-06.txt

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

At 10:12 AM -0700 10/25/02, Freeman Nancy-P26924 wrote:
> <long debate on audio logotypes deleted>
>
> Excuse me for jumping in on the middle of the discussion, but have 
> any blind or otherwise visually-impaired users been consulted on 
> this issue, or weighed-in on the discussion in this forum?  If so, 
> what has their general opinion been?

You mean asking the people who would be affected by our choices? Odd 
concept, that. :-)

It is clear that the two types of logos in this draft have very 
different purposes. The graphics are for ease-of-identification; the 
audio is for visually-impared users for whom the graphics are of no 
use.

For those of you new to this topic, the visually-impared community 
has a lot of very technically-savvy folks who know both how to 
specify what they need if the techncial community would just listen 
to them. Unless I missed it, we haven't listened to them, but have 
done what is typical, which is to assume that we know what is best 
for them (and my sincere apologies if I got that wrong).

We could easily come out with a graphics-only protocol document that 
says "we know that this excludes vision-impared users, and this can 
be rectified later when we are sure that our solution meets their 
needs". Otherwise, we risk saying "look, we fixed it for the 
visually-impared" but giving them something that is only partially 
useful or underspecified.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium