RE: Iterative improvements?

Hardware does not render content, except as driven by software, either read-only "firmware", or modifiable software.  I don't quite see why we would change this to aim towards software?


From: Michael Pluke [mailto:Mike.Pluke@castle-consult.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2012 8:13 PM
To: public-wcag2ict-tf@w3.org
Subject: Iterative improvements?

During that last WCAG2ICT call we agreed (re-confirmed) a definition of content as:

"Information and sensory experience to be communicated to the user by means of ICT, including any structure, presentation, and interaction.  (plus notes)"

This definition with "by means of ICT" originated from the M376 draft standard.

I now realise that this definition does not differentiate between content communicated by hardware (e.g. labels on physical controls) and non-embedded content (e.g. electronic documents) and software. As hardware is out of scope of WCAG2ICT this is not a major problem - but hardware is within the scope of M376 and Section 508.

I propose that we in WCAG2ICT use the replacement text:

"Information and sensory experience to be communicated to the user by means of software, including any structure, presentation, and interaction.  (plus notes)"

This should work for all content, embedded or not. Embedded content is, by definition, in software and must therefore be communicated by means of software. Non-embedded software needs a user agent to do the communicating to users. But WCAG clearly states that a user agent is software (did we really think it was something else!), so I think that substituting "software" for "ICT" works for all electronic content and avoids any confusion with content communicated by hardware.

Hopefully this small but important change is non-controversial. Do we need to survey?

Best regards

Mike

Received on Monday, 24 September 2012 12:21:01 UTC