25 November 06

When is a standard not a standard?

It’s not usually good form to slag off an old employer, especially not on the internet, and especially not your own blog. But one post on the LBI “stream” caught my attention recently. Entitled When is a standard not a standard?, it’s a long gripe about Joe Clark’s new Open and Closed project, which I’ve been talking about recently. Considering the post is on the official blog for a company employing 1,200 people, I feel it’s a misjudged post.

By using [Joe’s] industry persona and skills at self-promotion, he is clearly putting himself, and his own opinions, very much at the centre of the project.

It’s quite easy to disregard people who are good at self-promotion. “All bark and no bite”. But even in the post, it says that Joe is a “writer of a classic book on the subject [of accessibility]”, so you can’t discredit people who have authority in this area, just because his opinion is heard more than other peoples. Remember that Joe is one of very few people in this area, so more promotion that the cause gets, then the better it is. I somehow doubt Joe is arrogant enough to put himself before the rather more serious cause of helping disabled people.

After talking about the W3C, web standards and Joe’s WCAG Samuari project:

[W]hether we like it or not, the likes of Microsoft and IBM inevitably have a key role to play in the creation of, and adoption of, any standards – as they build the software which adheres to them

I do agree with this statement but it’s completely out of context. Standards to do with audio description, captioning and dubbing do not have anything to do with Microsoft or indeed IBM. The Open and Closed project has nothing to do with the W3C, the WCAG or the web. Joe even says on his donation page:

This is not Web accessibility except to the extent that Web sites use multimedia with one or more of those features.

Some may disagree with Joe’s methods. I’m not totally convinced by them, but there have been no results from the WCAG Samurai project as of yet, so we cannot see any results so therefore cannot tell whether this way of working is successful or not. Marcus ends the post with:

Standards produced outside this kind of framework are not standards at all – but merely opinions.

Let’s just suppose the outcomes of Open and Closed project are merely opinions. Isn’t this still better than the lack of any standards there is at the moment? Any standards which have been developed through research and evidence-gathering, which is what the project is all about, will be better than none. Anything that helps people is a good thing, isn’t it?

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