RE: Accessibility of web pages

In fact a large number of RSACi ratings are not 0,0,0,0. Likewise, even a
commercially biased claim is more useful than no claim at all, and since it
would become trivially easy to write a counter-claim (using, for example, a
version of teh Web Acccessibility Report Tool that generated such information
in metadata as well as a straight description) there would be some incentive
not to make wild claims - part of the architecture allows/requires claims to
be signed, and corporations are also interested in minimising the number of
people who say "the claims of company X are routinely untrustworthy" in a way
that show up in search engines...

In fact the primary goal as I see it is for editing software such as Amaya to
track the accessibility status of content being worked on, and only ask
authors to fix things that need fixing. (As well as having a way of recording
information if a Human tested something difficult to test by machine, that
persists when a new tool is used to work on the content.)

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Dave  J Woolley wrote:

  > From:	Charles McCathieNevile [SMTP:charles@w3.org]
  >
  > The WAI Evaluation and Repair Tools group is looking at developing a
  > metadata
  > language that describes the accessibility status of web pages, including
  > information about pages as a whole (for example is it valid) and
  > information
  >
  To me, such a language description would only be useful when created by
  a third party.  At the moment, first party creation would
  indicate someone who cared about accessibility and therefore
  probably already had a site with good accessibility.  I can't
  see commercial sites spending any effort at all on creating
  descriptions of their site, especially as it goes against the
  principle that all marketing material must be in positive tersm.

  First party rating under duress is likely to produce very
  liberal interpretations of anything subjective - how many RSACi
  rated sites claim anything but s0, l0, n0, v0 (I concede that one or
  two might actually bother to claim maximums on everything).


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
until 6 January 2001 at:
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 4 January 2001 04:59:46 UTC