WCAG 2.0 Comment Submission

Name: Jason White
Email: jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au
Affiliation: 
Document: W2
Item Number: Success Criterion 2.4.2
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Are you sure this can be applied, and ought to be applied, to everything that

qualifies as a \"Web page\" under the definition?



For example, how would this be applied to a multimedia object? A title could

be included in the captions, but it isn\'t clear that captions count for

purposes of satisfying this success criterion. Would the title have to be both

presented as part of the multimedia and audio described or captioned? If I

place a sound file on my Web site, it can qualify as a \"Web page\" under the

definition, but it isn\'t obvious that I can meet this success criterion. If

the sound file can include metadata, then perhaps providing a title in

metadata would be adequate - but does this imply that audio formats that don\'t

allow for metadata can\'t be used as part of a fully-conformant site? The same

question arises in relation to images, which also qualify as Web pages if they

are only linked to, not embedded as part of other resources.



Even if metadata can be embedded in the sound/image file, there is no

guarantee that the user can read it unless the specification of the format

requires user agents to be able to display the metadata.



It would appear that any interactive content providing a user interface can

satisfy this success criterion by including a title as part of the user

interface.

Proposed Change:
Perhaps this sc should be restricted to Web pages containing text, where

\"text\" does not include images of text. This would also admit HTML pages

containing only images, unless the presence of a text equivalent (under

guideline 1.1) is sufficient to make the page \"contain text\" for the purpose

of this proposal.



Restricting this sc to cases where the technology specifically provides for

the inclusion of titles (e.g., TITLE elements or equivalents) wouldn\'t work,

as there are surely cases in which the technology doesn\'t provide for the

identification of text as a title, but where it is still possible and

desirable to provide a title.



I suspect that this sc cannot remain at level A without restricting it to a

subset of Web pages.

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 02:33:49 UTC