Re: Accessibility Architectural Recommendations

bill@eramp.com wrote:
> 
> The TAG Charter (http://www.w3.org/2001/07/19-tag) refers to Architectural
> Recommendations produced by WAI...
> 
> "W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative and Internationalization Activity are
> already producing Architectural Recommendations in the areas of accessibility
> and internationalization, respectively."
> 
> I am having problems locating this on the web site. Could someone please point
> me in the direction of its location?

There are two accessibility Recommendations and one Candidate
Recommendation.

 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505

 Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-ATAG10-20000203

 User Agent Accessibility Guidelines
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-UAAG10-20010912/

In the realm of I18N, we have one Recommendation
and one Working Draft.

 Ruby Annotation
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-ruby-20010531/

 Character Model for the World Wide Web 
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-charmod-20010928/

The Character Model draft states clearly in the status section:

   "Due to the architectural nature of this document,
    it affects a large number of W3C Working Groups,
    but also software developers, content developers, 
    and writers and users of specifications outside the 
    W3C that have to interface with W3C specifications."

The same goes for the accessibility documents: they are
supposed to be the foundations of other work. Subsequent
W3C Recommendations are expected to follow the requirements
of these documents. So, for instance, the SVG 1.0 Recommendation
states in section G.5 [2]:

    "Additionally, an authoring tool which is a Conforming 
     SVG Generator conforms to all of the Priority 1 
     accessibility guidelines from the document 
     "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ATAG] 
     that are relevant to generators of SVG content. 
     (Priorities 2 and 3 are encouraged but not required 
     for conformance.)"

A similar, but less stringent statement refers to the User
Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, but these are not yet
a W3C Recommendation.

 - Ian

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/conform#ConformingSVGGenerators

-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2001 09:30:39 UTC