- From: John M Slatin <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
- Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 09:47:24 -0500
- To: <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>, "Web Content Guidelines" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Jason writes: <blockquote> I want to raise an issue that emerged from today's meeting. Many of our guidelines apply only to content that meets specific conditions. For example, guideline 1.1 is relevant only to content that includes non-text components. Guideline 2.1 applies only to content that specifies a user interface. There are numerous other examples throughout the document. At present, these conditions are not asserted explicitly in the document. My questions: 1. Should we state directly that content which doesn't have the characteristics assumed by a particular guideline is deemed to have passed, albeit trivially? This would mean for example that if one is claiming conformance for content that has no non-text components, guideline 1.1 level 3 is satisfied, by default as it were? </blockquote> Both WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 are careful to specify that text-only is a last resort in cases where single pages (not whole sites or sections) cannot be made accessible in any other way. And both are careful to require that such text-only variants be updated whenever the inaccessible "original" content is updated. If we go the route Jason is proposing, we'll need to be careful not to open up a back door to text-only variants of entire sites posted simply in order to claim conformance without doing any actual work. John
Received on Friday, 9 July 2004 10:47:26 UTC