Re: Reminder - request for response on WCAG 2.0 comments

Dear Loretta Guarino Reid and WCAG Working Group,
In my comment on the "Last Call Working Draft of the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines 2.0", I tried to advocate for the translation into a formal
language of a subset of the guidelines (the rules that can be
automatised) applied to some specific cases (e.g. HTML). This could be
in an appendix or another document.

I then suggested Schematron as one of the formalisms needed to express
accessibility rules in the case of HTML, since it has the advantage of
being based on W3C standards (XPath), is a good supplement to XML
Schema or Relax NG for complex accessibility rules, is easy to
implement (e.g. in XSLT), and many rules of WCAG 1.0 have already been
formalised in Schematron by various Open Source authors.

To that, you replied:

> This is a recommendation for a method for checking content for conformance,
> not a success criterion for conformance.
> The Working Group is not requiring that authors use any particular technique
> or tools for determining conformance.

I agree, but I did not mean that any particular validation technique
should be enforced; I just asked for a formalisation of the rules that
can easily be automatised in e.g. the HTML case. This formal language
would make the guidelines more precise and easy to implement with
whatever technique.

> We believe this comment is best directed to the
> Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group.

This is probably fine if someone actually does the job...

HTML is worth a special care regarding its accessibility. In this
context, I believe a W3C group could take the charge of providing some
reviewed schemas (e.g. in Schematron) for as many guidelines as
technically possible.

Finally, having some "official" schemas - even a subset and even
limited to simple HTML - could in my opinion greatly improve the
spreading of the whole guidelines and sensibility towards
accessibility, in particular in the Webmasters population who will
often not care about long plain English prose.

Ideally, another working group (e.g. validator team) could then
combine some of those schemas into the existing HTML validator. See
for instance [http://www.w3.org/2000/07/eval43/] for a starting point.

Thank you for your consideration.

Cordially,
Alexandre Alapetite
http://alexandre.alapetite.net/distribution/weblide/

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Loretta Guarino Reid [mailto:lorettaguarino@google.com]
Envoyé : vendredi 18 mai 2007 01:26
À : Alexandre Alapetite
Cc : public-comments-WCAG20@w3.org
Objet : Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Alexandre Alapetite ,

Thank you for your comments on the 2006 Last Call Working Draft of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/). We appreciate the
interest that you have taken in these guidelines.

We apologize for the delay in getting back to you. We received many
constructive comments, and sometimes addressing one issue would cause
us to revise wording covered by an earlier issue. We therefore waited
until all comments had been addressed before responding to commenters.

This message contains the comments you submitted and the resolutions
to your comments. Each comment includes a link to the archived copy of
your original comment on
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/, and may
also include links to the relevant changes in the updated WCAG 2.0
Public Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/.

PLEASE REVIEW the decisions  for the following comments and reply to
us by 7 June at public-comments-WCAG20@w3.org to say whether you are
satisfied with the decision taken. Note that this list is publicly
archived.

We also welcome your comments on the rest of the updated WCAG 2.0
Public Working Draft by 29 June 2007. We have revised the guidelines
and the accompanying documents substantially. A detailed summary of
issues, revisions, and rationales for changes is at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/05/change-summary.html . Please see
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ for more information about the current review.

Thank you,

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact

On behalf of the WCAG Working Group

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 1:

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/20060428121141.2F45EBDA7@w3c4.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-463)

Item Number: Conformance claims
Part of Item:
Comment Type: TE
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):

While many accessibility criteria can hardly be formalised to be
automatically checked by a validator, some of them can.

Previous attempts have been made to formalise some of WCAG 1.0, such
as the W3C "Web Content Accessibility Checking Service"
[http://www.w3.org/2000/07/eval43/] using Schematron
[http://www.w3.org/2000/07/eval43/wai.xml] or the more advanced Petr
Nalevka's "Relaxed validator" [http://relaxed.vse.cz/relaxed/] using
Relax NG with embedded Schematron
[http://relaxed.cvs.sourceforge.net/relaxed/relaxed/conf/schema/rng/modules/wcag.rng?view=markup].

Proposed Change:

Propose some schemas for checking some of the accessibility rules in
(at least) HTML documents (using e.g. XML Schema, Relax NG,
Schematron) checking for the criteria that can be formalised. Relax NG
+ Schematron is imho a good candidate.

----------------------------
Response from Working Group:
----------------------------

This is a recommendation for a method for checking content for
conformance, not a success criterion for conformance. The Working
Group is not requiring that authors use any particular technique or
tools for determining conformance. We believe this comment is best
directed to the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group.

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 02:42:15 UTC