Please review: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Working Draft

WAI Interest Group Members,

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) of W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) published the first public Working Draft
of WCAG 2.0 on 25 January 2001 [1]. This Working Draft shows how more
generalized (less HTML-specific) WCAG checkpoints might read. This draft is
not based on consensus of the WCAG Working Group, nor has it gone through
W3C process. Checkpoints in this Working Draft in no way supersede the
checkpoints in WCAG 1.0. 

This is a preliminary document, not stable or referenceable yet, with much
work still to be done. If you are interested in comparing checkpoints in
WCAG 1.0 with evolving checkpoints in the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft, please
refer to the Checkpoint Mapping [2]. Feedback will be welcome throughout
the course of document development, but feedback in the early stages of
document development is especially useful.

At this stage we invite comments on two mailing lists: 
- For any comments that you want to be sure are registered with the WCAG
Working Group regarding the January 25th WCAG 2.0 Working Draft, please
send them to w3c-wai-gl@w3.org by Thursday, 22 February, 2001.
- For general discussion about this Working Draft, please comment on
w3c-wai-ig@w3.org. That discussion will be monitored to some extent by the
WCAG Working Group, but it does not guarantee that every issue raised there
will be registered with the Working Group for formal discussion.

The WCAG Working Group welcomes comment on any aspect of the draft, but is
particularly interested in feedback on the following issues:

	1. Are the checkpoints and guidelines in the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft easier
to understand than in WCAG 1.0?  Has terminology been used that is hard to
understand?  We realize that filling in the Glossary will help with some of
these issues. Are there terms that are not listed in the Glossary that
should be?

	2. This initial public WCAG 2.0 Working Draft does not have as much
explanation for each guideline as WCAG 1.0. This is partially because the
WCAG Working Group has discussed a three-layered approach, with the first
layer being more explanatory (what are the basic ideas about Web content
accessibility, how can this document be referenced, etc.), the second layer
being the guidelines and checkpoints explaining how to make a Web site
accessible, and the third being techniques, tests, and/or examples that
would help explain how to implement this in different Web technologies.
What do people think about this approach? It might be hard to imagine since
the current Working Draft only includes the second layer, but we would
appreciate your thoughts on this.

3. There are only 22 Checkpoints in the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft versus over
60 in WCAG 1.0. Have we generalized things too much, or does it make it
easier to grasp the concepts?

4. Note that there are many open issues [3] that the WCAG Working Group
needs to discuss, and that this is just the first of many Working Drafts.

5. Other suggestions or comments are welcome.

This message may be circulated to other lists, but please be careful to
avoid cross-postings.

Thank you for your review,

Judy Brewer and Wendy Chisholm, on behalf of the WCAG WG

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/2001/01/25-mapping.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wcag20-issues.html

-- 
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE43-355, 200 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA,  02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 17:15:56 UTC