COMMENTS: March 16 Draft

I would just like to commend and congradulate all the members of the 
working group, and especially the chairs and editors for all their hard 
work in creating and developing the WWW content guidelines document. I 
think the draft is very good and will form the basis of helping authors 
understand how to make their WWW content more accessible.

But I do have some comments: 
1. It is unclear to me why checkpoints related to adding text information
to images was spread across two guidelines (Guideline 1 and Guideline 2). I
think it would be much more straight forward to have one guideline related
to images and discuss markup for ALT, TITLE, LONGDESC and techniques for
images specified in the OBJECT tag. 

I would also like to see a more complex graph or chart description in the
techniques section. Like an example from an on-line newspaper or the dow
jones industrial average (or an international stock composite index). I
think the long description should provide both the data and the authors 
intended conclusion or summary of the graph. I would be willing to help
with this if the editors request it.

2. Curious to know why "title" is not discussed related to images in
Checkpoint 1.1, since it is commomly used by authors with images. While it
is referenced for other elements in the guidelines it is not mentioned in
the guidelines ot technique document for images. 

3. I think guideline 2 could be more specific or be broken up into several
more direct guidelines like guidelines 3. 

My suggestion would be to: 
A. Put long description of image information into guideline 1. 
B. Break guideline 2 into two separate guidelines: 
Provide descriptions of video and animations 
Provide descriptions of applets and scripts

4. Checkpoint 5.7 
I think this checkpoint needs to be priority 1. If you use absolute units
in style sheet as soon as you increase font size you get alphabet soup. Or
if you leave it priority 2 could you add a reference in the techniques
document to have them check their page with style sheets turned off, to
make sure the page reads logically.

5. Checkpoint 7.4 
How will the summary attribute be used to indicate layout? 
Is the assumation that if you don't use TH element then the table is for 
layout? 
If this is so maybe it should be explictly stated somewhere.

6. Checkpoint 15.8 The term "distinguishing" information is not clear to me. 

7. Checkpoint 15.10 I would like to see grouping information as priority .
Since it is this type of information that helps people with disabilities
and assistive technologies be smarter and therefore more competitive in
access WWW pages.

Maybe there could be additional types of grouping examples and some
standards. Some examples: 
1. elements used for advertisement, like on search engine or informational
sites 
2. elements related to the same product in electronic catolog sites 
3. elements related to the same article in an electronic magazine or
newspaper, especailly if the articles cross columns or have related images

It would probably be difficult to get a standard markup for all the
possibiliites. But if user agents had a function that allowed people to
read items within the same grouping or ignore items with in the same 
grouping (like advertisements) it may be a way to improve document
navigation and orientation.










Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 1999 11:49:28 UTC