Two more editorial comments, on Aug 25 AU guidelines

I have two more editorial comments for consideration, if time allows. These
complete my comments on the pre last call guidelines document.

It's looking good.

- Judy

1) Guideline 6, 3rd paragraph: 
"Note that validity is an accessibility requirement, particularly for
assistive technologies." This needs clarification. 

If I am understanding the intended meaning correctly, given the surrounding
context which discusses checking & correction I would propose the following
re-wording: 

"Many assistive technologies used with browsers and multimedia players are
only able to provide access to Web documents that use valid mark-up.
Therefore validation of mark-up is an essential aspect of authoring tool
accessibility."

If that is the sense intended, you could move this paragraph before the
previous one, as it flows more directly from paragraph one of this section.


2) Terms & Definitions:
There are several undefined terms here: "Conversion Tool," "Automated
Markup Insertion Function." It would be helpful to any last call reviewers
to have these terms defined in order to evaluate any checkpoints associated
with them. 

In addition, the definition of "Document" here seems a bit cryptic: "A
document is a series of elements that are defined by a language." It could
be a lot of other things too; would help to clarify that this is a Web
document being referred to, and that the document is defined by a technical
language; but perhaps that's not the correct wording either.

The terms "Accessible" and "Accessibility" are given the same definition.
However, in this document "accessibility" also used in another way, which
bears defining: "Ensure that no accessibility content is missing." The
first few times I saw this I wanted to mark it up because it didn't quite
make sense, but I see the reason you're using it. But readers less familiar
with the topic may get lost, and a definition could help: "Accessibility
content: Content such as captions of audio, descriptions of video, or
descriptions of the function of an animation, that are necessary for some
users to access the meaning of a site." Or perhaps this should refer to
equivalent alternatives? 

The phrase "accessibility checking and correcting" from the intro should
probably be changed to "checking and correcting for accessibility" to be
more easily understood.


----------
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE43-355, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA,  02139,  USA

Received on Tuesday, 31 August 1999 19:59:25 UTC