Consensus Items

In the teleconference today, we had a couple things that we reached
consensus on with regard to conformance.  They are:

1.	There would be a "minimum standard" of accessibility.  In order
to assert any level of conformance (with WCAG 2.0) the content must meet
this minimum standard which consists of a predetermined set of
checkpoints.

2.	There would be one or more sets above the minimum.  (However, no
decision was made as to whether or not the next level would be "full
compliance" or whether there would be additional interim sets between
the minimum and the full.)

•	There continues to be a consensus that there needs to be ways to
assert compliance on an item-by-item basis above the minimum level, but
no further details as to any grouping yet.

3.	There was a consensus that:  "It seems like a good idea to
express conformance claims in machine-readable form, but we aren't sure
if we should require it of all claims or suggest it be used."

In discussing this last item, it was pointed out there were benefits to
users such as the ability to filter web pages (e.g., in a search) based
upon their accessibility (and therefore usability) to an individual, or
perhaps to prioritize them in a search so that the most accessible and
usable pages for the individual occurred first.

The machine-readable form discussed most in the meeting was EARL.

There were also some intriguing uses for machine-readable accessibility
information embedded in pages from a developer's point of view.  These
include using the meta data as a way of storing information about which
pages were more or less accessible in order to make it easier for sites
to continually improve over time and as resources became available
without having to continually reevaluate all of the pages.  This is
particularly true where human evaluation is needed in order to determine
some of the checkpoints.  Once a page was evaluated and recorded in
EARL, it would be possible later to easily go back and get summaries of
accessibility of the pages using an automated technique that would not
otherwise be possible (except for those guidelines which are completely
machine testable).

The above three numbered paragraphs (only) are hereby posted to the list
for comment.

Note that as of today, the complete list of consensus items can be found
in an appendix to our requirements document at:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wcag20-requirements#consensus



Gregg


-- ------------------------------
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Human Factors
Dept of Ind. Engr. - U of Wis.
Director - Trace R & D Center
Gv@trace.wisc.edu <mailto:Gv@trace.wisc.edu>, <http://trace.wisc.edu/>
FAX 608/262-8848 
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Received on Thursday, 18 October 2001 19:20:32 UTC