WCAG 2.0 Comment Submission

Name: Geoff Freed
Email: geoff_freed@wgbh.org
Affiliation: WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
Document: W2
Item Number: Conformance claims
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: TE
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):


Regarding baseline:  I\'ve read and re-read all the documentation about baseline and I just don\'t understand it.  It seems like baseline is a great way to blame the victim:  an author can claim that a user\'s accessibility problems are, in fact, strictly his or her problems.  The answer to any complaint is, \"That\'s not in my baseline, so I didn\'t test for it.\"  The only way it might be useful is in a closed environment, such as an Intranet, where authors really do know what technologies users have.  And the fact that baseline requires an entirely separate explanatory document indicates to me that it is *far* too complex to be useful.  



Regarding scoping:  \"Scoping\" of a conformance claim introduces a perfect loophole for anyone who simply doesn\'t want to do the work required to make things accessible.  Take Example 2:  \"A site has a collection of videos for which it is not required to and does not want to claim accessibility.\"  \"Not required?\"  But aren\'t captions required by SC 1.2?  Is \"I don\'t want to\" now a valid excuse?  Further, Example 2 states that a scoped conformance claim of \"I don\'t want to caption/describe the videos\" is valid as long as the videos are played only in a standalone player.  But if the videos are embedded in a Web page, suddenly they *must* be made accessible...?  I don\'t see the distinction.  Video is video.  If I\'ve created an on-line physics curriculum that uses a standalone player to show an entire semester of lectures, you\'re saying that these videos do *not* have to be accessible if I \"scope\" my conformance claim to exclude these materials?  



Proposed Change:


1.  Delete baseline.

2.  Delete scoping.

Received on Friday, 26 May 2006 16:02:13 UTC