Comments from George Kerscher on CAG 2.0

Dear All,

Sorry for being two days late.

I feel this is a major improvement over 1.0 -- great job.

I believe that we will be able to implement these guidelines on the
DAISY Web site, once they have been approved. I think we would try for
level three conformance.

I have a few comments that you will find below.


The guidelines say:
• Someone who cannot see will want to hear or read through braille
information that is usually presented visually.

I suggest:
• Someone who cannot see will want to hear or read with refreshable
braille the information that is usually presented visually.

It says in 1.1 at level 3:
No additional criteria:

I suggest:
Some sites that want to conform think they have to provide the textual
information each time it is presented. This becomes intrusive to using
the site. For example, they use a graphical bullet (image) for their
lists. The image is a picture of the corporate logo. This is described
in 10 words. The user each times hears, "This is the corporate logo
showing a heart with an arrow through it." There should be instructions
that provide this information once and after that, probably just bullet.


It says:
Checkpoint 1.3 Make all content and structure available independently of
presentation.

Success criteria

You will have successfully met Checkpoint 1.3 at the Minimum Level if:
List of 2 items
1. any information that is conveyed through presentation formatting is
also provided in either text or structure.
2. the following can be derived programmatically (i.e. through assistive
technology compatible markup or data model) from the content without
interpreting
presentation.
List of 3 items nesting level 1
A. any hierarchical elements and relationships, such as headings,
paragraphs and lists
B. any non-hierarchical relationships between elements such as
cross-references and linkages, associations between labels and controls,
associations between
cells and their headers, etc.
C. any emphasis
list end nesting level 1
• (presently no additional criteria for this level.)

I suggest: That we suggest that headings are marked up with heading
tags, paragraphs are marked with paragraphs, etc. Try to use the
semantically correct element for the content you are trying to present.

It says:
A news site causes its front page to be updated every 1/2 hour. The
front page contains minimal text and primarily consists of links to
content. A user
who does not wish the page to update selects a checkbox. The checkbox is
in the "user preferences" portion of the site which is one of the first
links

Do you mean every 1/2 minute?

It says:
You will have successfully met Checkpoint 3.1 at Level 2 if:
List of 1 items
1. the site has a statement asserting that author(s) or others have
reviewed content and added as much structure as they felt was
appropriate or possible.
list end

You will have successfully met Checkpoint 3.1 at Level 3 if:
List of 2 items
1. information is provided that would allow an assistive technology to
determine at least one logical, linear reading order
2. diagrams are constructed in a fashion so that they have structure
that can be accessed by the user.
list end


I suggest: I am not sure that people understand what we mean by
structure. Somewhere higher up in the document a description of
structure should be given.  There is also mention of hierarchy, but what
does that mean in W3C/XHTML terms? Our we talking about organization
into headings, or nested div or what. I normally produce documents that
use headings as headings are intended to be used and it is this high
level structure that makes the organization useful for me.
What I mean by a heading is something that is marked up as a h1 through
h6. I don't think this is specific in the guidelines -- it almost looks
like this was specifically avoided; was it?



Best
George

George Kerscher, Senior Officer, Accessible Information
Recording For the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D)
http://www.rfbd.org
Project Manager to the DAISY Consortium
http://www.daisy.org
Chair Open eBook Forum (OeBF)
http://www.openebook.org
Co-chair WAI Steering Counsel
http://www.w3.org/wai
Email: kerscher@montana.com
Phone: +1 406/549-4687

Received on Sunday, 20 October 2002 13:36:22 UTC