Tool Reviews Re: 15-16 July f2f minutes available

Judy asked:

  JB: How much work would it take as a distributed effort to go for reviewing
  the 10 or 12 most interesting UAs and updating them according to the
  template.

It's a difficult question to answer. Knowing WCAG, Amaya, and ATAG extremely
well, and having worked in depth with all of them for a long time, it took me
about 5 hours to do a basic review of Amaya.

My experience is that few people know tools better than they need to for
their own job - this includes developers - and that few of those also know
WCAG and ATAG really well. And some of the most popular tools (Word,
Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Notes/Domino, Powerpoint spring to mind
although I don't have good quality statistics to back that up, just talking
to designers) are in areas where the development of techniques is at a
relatively low level, so the reviewer has to think quite carefully. Amaya's
SVG implementation lacks so many accessibility features that it saved a lot
of time in assessment - when it gets better I expect to spend a lot more time
thinking in order to do a full assessment of a newer version.

Reading documentation and getting familiar with everything a tool can do
probably takes a year. There are people who have done this for tools.
Learning ATAG and WCAG probably takes a couple of months - although the
working group has done this, they might not be familiar with the top 10 or 12
tools to the extent required for an assessment.

A couple of people working together to combine knowledge (one expert in
ATAG/WCAG and one in the tool) could probably do a full review by working
together for 20 or so hours over a couple of weeks.

(If the tool completely fails it is faster, of course. There is a lot of
testing to do a tool that is pretty good...)

cheers

Chaals

On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Matt May wrote:

>
>The AU face-to-face notes are now available:
>
>http://www.w3.org/2002/07/16-atag-minutes.html
>
>----
>Matt May, Web Accessibility Specialist, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
>World Wide Web Consortium (W3C/MIT) http://www.w3.org/WAI/
>200 Technology Square, NE43-342, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
>

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2002 18:45:42 UTC