Progress report for User Agent Guidelines Working Group

Hello WAI Interest Group,

The review period of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (UAAG
1.0) Proposed Recommendation (PR) ended 7 April 2000, and you may be
wondering about the User Agent Working Group's (UAWG) progress since
then. The UAWG resolved most of issues raised during PR in the weeks
that followed the end of the review (thanks, in part, to a
face-to-face meeting at the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic in
Princeton, New Jersey in early April).

However, a few issues proved more difficult to resolve quickly.
Several reviewers commented that some of the requirements
(checkpoints) were too vague and it was therefore difficult to
determine what a user agent needed to implement in order to
conform. As a result, for the last several months, the UAWG has been
clarifying and sharpening the requirements of the document.
These clarifications and links to disucssion and resolutions
are documented in "Determining Conformance to the User Agent 
Guidelines" [1]. The actual changes have been incorporated directly
into the UAAG 1.0 (refer to the 18 August draft [2]).

The UAWG still has a few issues [3] to resolve, but is nearly ready to
request a last call review of the document. To the extent possible,
the UAWG has made changes that clarify the document but do not add new
requirements. The complete revision history of the UAAG 1.0 
and Techniques is available on the Web [4].

Your review during the upcoming last call will be very important. You
may send comments to the Working Group about the 18 August draft [2]
(and probably should send important comments), but if you intend a
substantial last call review, we recommend waiting until the last call
period begins, a more formal indicator that the UAWG considers it has
completed its task.

Thank you,

 - Ian

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/2000/05/ua-minreqs
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAG10-20000818
[3] http://server.rehab.uiuc.edu/ua-issues/issues-linear.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/wai-ua-wd-changes.html

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Monday, 28 August 2000 18:39:06 UTC