Re: What does WCAG mean by "a set of Web units"

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 10:27:23PM -0500, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote:
>    All the approaches have problems -- which is our problem.
> 
> Two problems with the conformance statement approach.
> 
> 1- we don't require a conformance statement.  So if there is no conformance
> claim then an evaluator has nothing to work from.  
Yes, but that's true anyway. For example, the evaluator doesn't know what the
baseline is supposed to be unless a conformance claim exists. Note that
writing a conformance claim is not the same as publishing one. A content
creator can write a conformance claim and make it available to one or more
chosen evaluators without releasing it to the public at large.

Of course, any evaluator has to decide what content to evaluate. One approach
to this, in the absence of a conformance claim provided by the content
creator, would be to decide what the evaluator thinks ought to be included,
formulate a conformance claim on that basis, and then assess the content. The
conformance claim formulated by the evaluator then becomes the hypothesis to
be tested.

The result of the above is that sets of Web units can still be determined by
the scope of a conformance claim, noting that such a claim need not be
published and need not be provided by the content creator.
> 
> 2 - one could make conformance claims by page - in which case there are no
> sets of page and all the consistency requirements go away.
The solution here is to specify that if a Web unit within the scope of a
conformance claim is linked to another Web unit also covered by a WCAG 2.0
conformance claim issued by the same claimant, then both such Web units are
deemed to lie within the scope of the claim for purposes of the consistency
requirements. That is to say, how the claims are stated has no effect on their
content; we simply aggregate the claims for purposes of evaluation.

As a further complication to the foregoing, this might have to be restricted
to claims at the same conformance level. All inter-linked Web units claimed by
the same entity to conform at a given conformance level are considered to
constitute the set of Web units.

Received on Friday, 18 August 2006 08:40:55 UTC