Re: ERT Action Item: Use Case Scenarios for EARL

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:54:16 +1000, Johannes Koch  
<johannes.koch@fit.fraunhofer.de> wrote:

>
> Giorgio Brajnik wrote:
>
>> A possible way to increase market pressure on EARL could be the  
>> adoption, by WAI, of a new "accessibility conformity logo" to be put,  
>> by web developers, into the pages they produce to claim a certain level  
>> of accessibility (eg. wcag1.0 AA). Like the one that is usually linked  
>> to http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1A-Conformance.html.en .
>
> One problem that I see is: For HTML validity you have strict rules that  
> can be checked automatically. In fact that is what makes up validation  
> (at least in the SGML context): checking against a formal grammar, like  
> a referenced DTD. For the WCAG accessibility levels it is not sufficient  
> to pass an automated test. So the logo could only claim "passed XYZ  
> automated test with no errors".

No, the way that Hera is designed to work does the sort of thing Giorgio  
is suggesting.

First it runs some automatic tests. Some of these give outright results,  
some are diagnostic. The diagnostic results, plus the tests that can't be  
automated at all (wel, for which we have no automation :-) are used to  
guide the user to do manual review. The results are combined, and this is  
used to give an overall result.

I agree with Giorgio that WCAG should put more "pressure" on clamaints to  
justify use of the logos with some detailed assessment, and point out that  
"only the automated tests" isn't suficient to justify a conformance claim  
in most cases.

I also think it is useful to produce EARL reports for cases like IMS, who  
don't really care about WCAG's conformance levels but do care about  
various particular aspects, since their focus is to determine whether a  
particular piece of content will match a partiular user, whose profile of  
needs isn't one of the WCAG conformance levels.

This is not to suggest that the WCAG levels are a bad idea, just that they  
are a pretty crude general measure and not sufficiently detailed for many  
important use cases.

cheers

Chaals

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

Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 09:08:27 UTC