Re: Wombat Subtext 4.1, 4.2

Just a few questions:

1. Must a compliant tool start the check on its own? (i.e. after a save,
before publishing, on the 27th minute of editing, etc.) Or is it
sufficient to have a "Check Accessibility" item in the menu, or even a
"How to check accessibility" section in somewhere in the Help.

2. Is it sufficient to provide a copy of the applicable WCAG techniques
document? Or would a compliant system re-work the techniques to make it
easier to manually check one after another?

3. How is the "inform" part done? Is this implicit in the fact that the
author is the one who did the checks? Or should the tool allow the user
to record the status of each manual check as it is done and then use
this to inform them of the problems?


> The minimum would be to ask the author to perform manual checks for each
> WCAG item (at the various priority levels). I agree that that would result
> in a horrid tool, but it would do the job better than many things people are
> using at the moment. One optimisation would be to customise the checks.
> Another is to automate parts of them. A good tool will do some of both and
> more besides. And the question of what part of the workflow  this happens at
> is orthogonal - if it happens the tool can pass, if it doesn't the tool
> fails, and if it has to be configured to happen then the tool can only pass
> in that configuration.
> 
> On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Jan Richards wrote:
> 
>   I think we would all agree that it is not sufficient to put the full
>   WCAG guideines and relevant techniques into the tool's help section for
>   the author's reference.
> CMN:Yep.
> JR  But, at the same time, we don't want to require that everything be
>   automated, since some of the WCAG guidelines are not reasonably machine
>   checkable at the current time.
> 
>   In your message, you mention "prompting for everything" should be
>   sufficient to meet the checkpoint. Do you mean asking the user to
>   perform a number of specific manual checks?

-- 
Cheers,
Jan

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Jan Richards
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
University of Toronto

jan.richards@utoronto.ca
Tel: (416) 946-7060  Fax: (416) 971-2896

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Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2001 09:45:31 UTC