Re: Confidence Claims - more discussion

Hi,

Chris Ridpath wrote:
> I don't think it's necessary to state that the first image has an alt 
> attribute and the second image has an alt attribute and the third image 
> etc. You just need to state that all images have an alt attribute.

I understand your argument. However, what is wrong with having a huge (raw) data source so that users can query to generate customized reports? Let me explain by example:

A tool generates a huge EARL report with every finding it makes (image one has alt text, image one alt text seems long, image two has no alt text, etc etc). Besides this, it has some rules (preferably an OWL ontology) that specifies how to aggregate these basic results into higher level assertions. For example, if all results of test-1 and test-2 have the value pass, then checkpoint XY also passes. This logic is currently hard coded into the tools anyway, it's a matter of making it more explicit (by the way, taking this logic outside the programing language into a more modifiable form, these rules become more easily tweakable to accommodate WCAG 2.0 for example).

Anyway, while most end users may be satisfied with only the higher-level summaries (such as report on a checkpoint level), some users (or tools) can query specific information as they desire. For example, when an evaluation tool is re-run over the same content, it could query it's own report to see previous results that may have been carried out by a human evaluator and would therefore be expensive to repeat. Why lose information that you already have?

Regards,
  Shadi


-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra,       Web Accessibility Specialist for Europe 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),             http://www.w3.org/ 
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IST WAI-TIES Project (WAI-TIES)     http://www.w3.org/WAI/TIES/ 
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Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 14:06:01 UTC