Comments on ATAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft

"ATAG 2.0 requires published content type-specific WCAG benchmark
documents" - this seems worrisome. Who publishes these? Is WCAG still
planning to publish Technique documents for specific content types?
ATAG has links to what I think are obsolete techniques documents.

ATAG conformance appears to be user agent based, not technology based;
conformance claims for web-based functionality must list the name and
versions of user agents tested against. Oddly enough, for
non-web-based functionality, comparable info is required for the OS,
and the accessibility API must be listed, but there seems to be no
requirement to test against AT.

Yow - an ATAG conformance claim includes documenting how each SC was
satisfied! I don't think we are going to see many ATAG conformance
claims written up...

ATAG makes WCAG techniques normative for a particular conformance
claim. Given that we view those documents as non-normative, and that
they will change over time, this seems problematic.

I'm a bit confused by A.0.1. Even with the rationale and note, it took
me a while to sort out that this only applies to aspects of the tool
that are displayed on the web. For non-web-based authoring tools, this
is probably nothing. For web-based authoring tools, they are web
content; I guess this just says that web content needs to conform to
WCAG.

A.1.1, SC 3 has an ambiguity: I first read it to say that text
alternatives must be displayed in the content being edited, but I
think it means to says that that there must be a way to display all
text alternatives (and that text alternatives are required for
non-text objects in the content). Similarly for A.1.2 SC 2. I'm not
sure whether it would be clearer to paraphrase: "All editing views
must include an option to display the text alternatives provided for
non-text objects in the content being edited."

Why does A.1.1 SC 2 address multimedia? Shouldn't that be an A.1.2 SC?

I'm worried that satisfying WCAG does not satisfy UAAG, and that WCAG
relies on UAAG requirements to make effective use of programmatically
determined properties of the content. In this case, the authoring tool
is the user agent for this web content, I think. This seems related to
A.1.3, but I haven't worked out how. In particular, I don't think that
satisfying A.0.1 for web-based authoring tools will necessarily meet
this checkpoint, depending on the characteristics of the user agent.

A.1.5 SC 3 "the semantic description of the presentation" probably
wants to be "the semantic description of the information encoded in
the presentation". And given our WCAG discussions, I'm not sure this
is always possible, at least for web-based authoring tools.

It also seems as if A.1.5 SC 3 and SC 4 should be combined; color is
just authoring tool-controlled presentation. Is SC 4 additional
requirements on the use of color? Is color the only form of
presentation that can be satisfied by an alternate version (per (b))?

A.2.1 SC 1 is task based! I'm not sure I see a definition of task or
authoring task.

A.2.2 - (a) do any applications let authors control the order of menu
items in menus? (b) what does "available" mean in this context? Would
keyboard shortcuts stop working if items weren't available? Does
disabling an item count? Or removing it from the visible UI?

A.3.3 SC 1: while I can see why it is stated this way, it feels like
the appeal to WCAG might disqualify something like the use of a Word
document or OS-specific documentation format that is accessible on
that platform, but not on the web.

A.4.1 SC 2 seems confusing to me. Is it just requiring that the
accessibility API support be documented for AT developers? Actually, I
don't understand the distinction between A.4.1 and A.4.2.

Glossary:
"accessibility problem, Web content
A Web content accessibility problem is an aspect of Web content
that fails to meet some requirement of WCAG. The severity of a given
problem is relative and is determined by reference to WCAG"

This reflects the misunderstanding of WCAG 2 conformance levels as
correlated to levels of accessibility. It may be appropriate for WCAG
1 conformance levels.

"content type
A content type is a data format, programming or markup language
that is intended to be retrieved and rendered by a user agent (e.g.,
HTML, CSS, SVG, PNG, PDF, Flash, JavaScript or combinations). The
usage of the term is a subset of WCAG 2.0's [WCAG20] current usage of
the term "Technology"."

How is it only a subset? What is excluded?

Received on Friday, 12 January 2007 06:34:06 UTC