WCAG 2.0 Comment Submission

Name: Sailesh Panchang
Email: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
Affiliation: Deque Systems Inc
Document: W2
Item Number: Conformance levels and the baseline
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: GE
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Conformance and Definition of L1, L2 and L3 for success criteria

For L1 and L2, the chief distinction is between ‘minimum level’ and ‘enhanced level’ of accessibility as the second factor (reasonably applies to all Web content)  is common.

I contend that the terms ‘minimum’ and enhanced’ cannot be viewed in a vacuum without a context. For a user with particular kind of vision impairment (VI), ability to manipulate background / foreground colors may provide minimum accessibility and ability to manipulate text size may provide enhanced level of accessibility. For another person with VI, both or just the second one may be needed to provide minimum accessibility.

Question: So in what context is the level determined?



Proposed Change:
Integrate the baseline into the definition of L1, L2 etc. This will mean that SC at L1 exploit all accessibility features available  in the baseline technology and this provides the necessary context.  

In doing so the WG will be able to justify its statement: ‘WG believes that all success criteria of WCAG 2.0 are essential for some people’ and yet not say that one checkpoint is more important than another like in WCAG 1.0.



At present obviously  an SC at L1 is more important than one at L2 because the former is supposed to provide ‘minimum accessibility’ and a developer will be encouraged to implement these first.

Received on Friday, 16 June 2006 18:12:27 UTC