Review comments: WCAG 2.0 Working Draft

Hi Wendy et al.,

As requested, enclosed please find my comments to the WCAG 2.0 working draft. 

As a general comment, I would urge you to consider how to make the document itself more accessible to the target audience. It's contains a lot of w3c- and accessibility-lingo, that may make it a difficult read to anyone not already well versed on the subject matter.

Kind regards

Lars Ballieu Christensen
Accessibility consultant, Ph.D., cand.comm.
Sensus ApS - lbc@sensus.dk - www.sensus.dk
Tel: +45 48 22 10 03 - GSM: +45 40 32 68 23

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Comments:

Disability vs. mainstream
Since most of the issues remain identical, I would recommend that the main aim be shifted slightly from accommodating “people with disabilities” to be more along the lines of ensuring that web content is available to “as many people in as many situations and from as many technology platforms as possible.”  To the vast majority of web site owners, ensuring accessibility for people using Macs, PDAs or SmartPhones is much more of an incentive than ensuring accessibility for disabled users. Likewise, I do not believe that we will achieve a reasonable level of accessibility before we have successfully managed to turn the problem into something mainstream.

Call it a browser
If the document is to be readable by many different audiences, then I recommend that you use common words such as “browser” rather than w3c-terms such as “user agent”.

Categories of success criteria
I find the definition of the three categories of success criteria rather difficult to understand, and recommend that the section be rephrased to make it easier to read ... again considering the wide audience of the document. 

Conformance requirements
Isn’t option 1. redundant?

Design principle
Perhaps a note should be added explaining why those four principles were selected as “basic”. It’s not necessarily clear why these four principle were selected.

User needs
You may want to add a few non-disability scenarios, such as users using a Macintish computer to access his or her online bank, users on holiday attempting to access a news site on a SmartPhone, etc. Likewise, you may want to consider adding non-disbility benefits and examples in the guideline sections.

Guideline 1.3
The guideline and its success criteria are difficult to read and understand, and I doubt that a wider audience will understand it. 

However, in my experience its quite important and could even be a candidate as a basic design principle: Don’t use structure for presentation! Even in the WCAG 1.0, it should have been a priority 0 rather than a mix between prio 1 and prio 2.

Guideline 2.1
Why not entirely device independent, not assuming any particular input device? Voice activation is an alternative to both keyboard and mouse, and should be accommodated.

Guideline 4.1
It would be highly valuable to be slightly more firm on popular non-W3C formats such as pdf and Flash.

Received on Tuesday, 7 September 2004 09:45:49 UTC