for WCAG Re: FW: Issues and proposals: conformance claims

On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:17:57 +1000, Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org> wrote:

> Please find below a snippet of a mail from Wendy to the WCAG WG. It is a  
> proposal for a possible conformance claim template in WCAG 2.0. How well  
> could we support such a claim in EARL?

Coments inline...

> IMO, this strengthens the case to include a way to "cascade" sub-tests  
> for an overall claim (i.e. "Page X claims Level-A because it passed  
> test-1, test-2, and test-3").

>> A conformance claim includes the following assertions:
>> 1. Required: The date of the claim.

We have that in what we require in EARL

>> 2. Required: The guidelines title/version: "Web Content Accessibility
>> Guidelines 2.0"
>> 3. Required: The URI of the guidelines:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-WCAG20-YYYYMMDD/
>> 4. Required: The conformance level satisfied: "A", "AA", or "AAA" (or
>> 1, 2, or 3??)

If the WCAG working group is prepared to approve an RDF form of WCAG 2.0  
which identiies the checkpoints and the conformance levels with a URI, and  
provides titles and so on for each of them, then it is just a case of  
querying for this information. An rdfs:seeAlso could be used to point to  
the relevant stuff inside the EARL report, and nothing would stop tools  
 from actually copying the relevant information into the report itself.

>> 5. Required: A list of the specifications used to create the content
>> for which the claim is being made.  This includes markup languages,
>> style sheet languages, scripting/programming languages,  image formats,
>> and multimedia formats.
>> 6. Required: For each specification, indication if the technology is
>> "used" or "relied upon" (i.e., if used - the content is usable if that
>> technology is turned off or not supported. if relied upon - the content
>> is not usable if that technology is turned off or not supported)

This is description of the subject. We don't provide any particular  
mechanism to do this, but any relevant RDF would do. It might be that  
something like DOAP already has the properties they are looking for.

something like

<subject>
   <TestSubject r:about="#foo">
     <some:uses r:resource="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
     <some:needs r:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21"/>
  ...

(We should look at the W3C's RDF about their specifications to figure out  
what URIs to use to describe them).

By the way, this is another reason why I think we should seperate the  
subject from the context within the subject - it makes it easier to  
describe each seperately.

The IMS (I dunno what the acronym MeanS :-) or LOM (Learning Object  
Metadata) folks might already have this stuff somewhere, too. Time to go  
digging into their schemata...

>> 7. Required: Scope of the claim (a uri, list of uris or a regular
>> expression)

Yep, this is just the subject.

>> 8. Optional: A list of user agents that the content has been tested on.
>> This should include assistive technologies.

This is beyond EARL as it stands, but again we could look for RDF that  
does it. This is pretty close to the "using" property that we are using at  
Sidar - see my message from a few minutes ago at  
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wai-ert/2005Apr/0097.html (or  
the followup) and might actually be a use case for it.

>> 9. Optional: Information about audience assumptions or target audience.
>> This could include language, geographic information,  interests or ???

Again, this is beyond EARL, but no reason we couldn't find RDF that did it.

Looking at the examples, it isn't clear what the scope is in the first and  
third. I'll have a think and try to write up RDF that covers the examles  
anyway, but it might take a while.

cheers

Chaals


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 10 April 2005 06:42:08 UTC