Next meeting monday 1/15/2001

Our next meeting is
  Monday January 15, 2001, 10:00-11:30 Eastern USA Time     (GMT -05:00) on 
the MIT bridge (+1 617-258-7910).

Agenda:

1. Lets decide whether to keep the name "Evaluation Description Language" 
(EDL) or Evaluation And Repair Language (EARL) or something else.  By 
majority vote of whomever is present at the teleconference, excluding the 
chair (i.e. me) except to break a tie.  I hope we can do this in 5 minutes 
max.  If not, we'll try to resolve on the list.

2. Testability.  Over in WCAG there's been a debate about requiring web 
pages to be designed to facilitate testing for accessibility: and in 
particular mimimizing the amount of human effort required to verify 
accessibility--since it's the human effort that determines cost and speed 
in the long run.   (Disclosure: I started it).

- An agument for the requirement is that if accessibility is too time 
consuming and costly to test for, the testing wouldn't get done, and in 
practice, accessibility will suffer.  Also, to the extent testing can be 
automated, the testing can be done independently by the person with the 
disability, which is in itself a desirable goal.

- An argument against the requirement is that a page can be highly 
accessible even if it's hard for a third party to test, so the requirement 
does nothing to increase accessibility.  Furthermore, accessibility can be 
provided by offering different version of a site to different users, which 
actually optimizes accessibility; but if the method uses proprietary rules 
those rules must be hidden, making it hard to independently test the 
accessibility "black box" fashion, so requiring testability is an unfair 
burden.  (I may not be doing this counter argument-justice since I'm an 
advocate for the other side).

The discussion in WCAG is the thread "Checkpoint on Accessibility" and 
starts at

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2000OctDec/0889.html

Also, there's a related matter in the thread, how to declare that a site is 
accessible, but I'd like to focus on testability.

I'd like to see we can create a ER consensus position on this issue for 
presentation to WCAG.  (of course, many of us are also part of WCAG, but 
not all of us are, and perhaps we can keep an ER point of view).

(If you want to post a response to this testability issue, please start a 
new thread with subject e.g. "Testability".

3. Open Issues. In preparation for the face to face meeting, what open 
issues do we wish to discuss with WCAG?
The open issues list

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/ert-open-issues.html

has WCAG issues denoted by the label [WCAG].  Note: Wendy may have an 
update of list by monday.

4. If time (which is unlikely),  discussion of testing Javascript.

Len

p.s.
Have you registered yet for the face to face?  Info is on the ER/IG Home 
page http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/#plenary



--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Saturday, 13 January 2001 09:50:40 UTC