In response to your comment on W3C/WAI's ATAG 2.0

Thank you for your thoughtful and thorough comment about the ATAG 2.0 
Last Call Working Draft of 10 September 2013.  The Authoring Tool 
Accessibility Guidelines  Working Group (AUWG) has considered your 
comment and made the changes itemized below.

Please review our changes in response to your comment, and reply to us 
by 14 October 2013 to say whether you accept them or to discuss 
additional concerns you have with our response. If we do not hear from 
you by that date, we will mark your comment as "no response" and close 
it. If you need more time to consider your acknowledgement, please let 
us know. You can respond by email to public-atag2-comments@w3.org. Note 
that this list is publicly archived.

The AUWG recognizes the important role that authoring tools can play in 
managing compliance at the level of websites and enterprises, as opposed 
to simply evaluating content on a page-by-page basis.  That is why ATAG 
2.0 already includes the following success criterion:

- B.3.1.5 Programmatic Association of Results: If the authoring tool 
provides checks, then the authoring tool can programmatically associate 
accessibility checking results with the web content that was checked. 
(Level AA) (http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-ATAG20-20130910/#sc_b315)

The intent, examples, and related resources for B.3.1.5 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-IMPLEMENTING-ATAG20-20130910/#sc_b315) 
specifically mention "increasing the interoperability of separated 
checking and repair tools" and make multiple references to EARL.

In the opinion of the Working Group, this success criterion covers the 
normative requirements you proposed. However, we believe that the intent 
for the success criterion would benefit from some of the examples in 
your rationale. Therefore, we will make the following change to the 
(informative) intent.

You can see this change integrated in the most recent Editors' Draft at 
http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/2013/ED-IMPLEMENTING-ATAG20-20131002/#sc_b315

---start of proposal---

Intent of Success Criterion B.3.1.5:

The intent of this success criterion is to facilitate and encourage 
automated use of accessibility checking results, which can benefit both 
authors and end users in multiple ways:

    * Supports author choice of tools: Programmatic association of 
checking results enables independent checking and repair tools to 
interoperate, so authors can choose the tools that meet their own needs.
    * Supports diverse workflows: Programmatic association of checking 
results enables accessibility evaluation and repair processes to be 
separated, supporting a wide variety of workflows including those 
necessary in complex and multi-stakeholder environments. For example, a 
complex CMS with a continuously running website accessibility checker 
might automatically queue up certain issues to be repaired later by a 
different author within a quality assurance view.
    * Supports evaluation result aggregation: Programmatic association 
of checking results enables systems that can aggregate evaluation 
results for large-scale monitoring, auditing, ranking, and research 
purposes. Aggregation of manual and semi-automated evaluation results 
are especially important, since they cannot be produced on-demand as is 
the case for fully automated evaluations.
    * Supports accessible resource discovery: Systems that support 
accessible resource discovery take the accessibility preferences of end 
users into account when fetching content. This allows authors to offer 
multiple versions of content with differing accessibility levels while 
still enabling end users to receive versions that are accessible to them.

The success criterion does not specify the format of the programmatic 
association, which may be specific (e.g. individual check results) or 
more general (e.g. WCAG 2.0 conformance level). However, formats that 
include specific checking results are typically more useful for 
accessible resource discovery because individual end users may have 
preferences for certain types of accessibility information (e.g. 
captions), but not for others (e.g. audio descriptions).

---end of proposal---

Regards,

Jeanne Spellman
W3C Staff Contact to AUWG
jeanne@w3.org

Received on Monday, 7 October 2013 21:47:10 UTC