- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:53:35 +0200
- To: public-wai-ert@w3.org
Hi Johannes, At 12:20 30/03/2006, Johannes Koch wrote: >Christophe Strobbe wrote: >(...) >>- most importantly, "avoid" in WCAG 1.0 is a guideline for developers, >>not a prohibition regarding markup (unlike WCAG 2.0, WCAG 1.0 does not >>have success criteria for content, but only guidelines, i.e. advice, to >>developers); > >For me "avoid" means something like "don't use". Sounds like you think >it's not suitable to make laws etc. based on WCAG 1.0. We both know (for example from our experience with UWEM [1]) that evaluating web content against WCAG 1.0 is problematic. WCAG 1.0 provides guidelines to developers; it says "provide this", "ensure that", etcetera. These are things that developers can integrate into a development process, they describe processes or tasks, not criteria or features. This means that the only appropriate way to evaluate WCAG 1.0 conformance is an evaluation of development processes. I seems to me that checking Web content against WCAG 1.0 is akin to evaluating a business for ISO 9001 by looking only at its products instead of at its processes (and their paper trails). (Yes, I am aware that this kind of evaluations is commonplace for WCAG 1.0.) Unlike WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0 is written as a set criteria that you can check in web content. In fact, I think that it would be a good idea to rename WCAG 2.0 to "Accessibility Criteria for Web Content 1.0" to explicitly draw attention to this essential difference. Whether WCAG 1.0 is suitable to base laws on depends on what the legislator wants to control: process or actual content. [1] For readers who were not aware of this: UWEM stands for "Unified Web Evaluation Methodology"; version 0.5 is available at http://www.wabcluster.org/uwem05/uwem_0_5.html; version 0.9 will be available soon. Regards, Christophe -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 10:53:42 UTC