Use alternative versions only when necessary

Name: Greg Gay
Email: g.gay@utoronto.ca
Affiliation: UofT ATRC
Document: W2
Item Number: Conformance Requirements
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: editorial
Summary of Issue: Use alternative versions only when necessary
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
4.)  An accessible link from the nonconformant version to a conformant version (and back again) seems straight forward (am I perhaps missing something here?). The idea though that alternate versions only be used when the original version can not be made accessible, seems to have been dropped. This is important because it is fairly well known that secondary versions tend not to be updated at the same frequency as the primary version (I don\'t have a referecne). Instead of saying “...does not meet all of the success criteria...” say “.., can not be made to meet all success criteria..

Fallback #2 seems insufficient. Users should be able to find an accessible version directly from the less accessible version.  #2 suggests something similar to using a transcript instead of captioning for a video. A transcript, while useful when captions can not be provided, or used in place of a video where a video player is not available, is  not all that useful when watching a video and trying to match the lines of the transcript with the apparent dialogue and actions it contains. Similarly a list of accessible alternate pages has limited utility, forcing the user to perhaps  leave a sequence of page, or loose the consistency provided by the primary version, and its environment.   



Fallback #1, I\'m not sure about. What constitutes “...WCAG conformant links?”  and is it relevant that future technologies many not conform to them. Should it not be a requirement that future technologies conform if they are to be judge accessibility supported? Any “link” that is readable by assistive technologies (contains readable text) and is device independent (keyboard accessible) should conform. Both of these are already requirements (1.1, 2.1)



Proposed Change:

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 16:30:09 UTC