Validity as a technique

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to find some middle ground on the topic of the requirement for
validity in WCAG. One of the many arguments for requiring validity at level
1 had to do with the fact that otherwise, some of our other requirements
wouldn't be met because you can't programmatically determine things if there
are syntax errors. That made me think: isn't validity a necessary but not
sufficient technique for some of our guidelines? 

I propose to delete the requirement for validity from our guideines and
instead list it as a necessary but not sufficient technique for all the
success criteria that require something can be 'programmatically
determined'. I think this would solve many of the problems:

* We do not require it in the normative section (the guidelines), which
prevents legal actions against websites that are accessible but do not
validate because they used an attribute that isn't defined in the specs.

* We limit our guidelines to things that clearly cause accessibility
problems when violated, which makes the document more believable. Since
validity falls into the category of 'how to do this' this is put in the
techniques. 

* We stimulate using other W3C standards and emphasize the importance of
validity without using WCAG as a platform for other agendas such as the
promotion of valid code. 

Any thoughts?

Yvette Hoitink
Heritas, Enschede, the Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl
WWW: http://www.heritas.nl

Received on Monday, 7 November 2005 15:43:01 UTC