Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Art Wagner ,

Thank you for your comments on the 2006 Last Call Working Draft of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/). We appreciate the
interest that you have taken in these guidelines.

We apologize for the delay in getting back to you. We received many
constructive comments, and sometimes addressing one issue would cause
us to revise wording covered by an earlier issue. We therefore waited
until all comments had been addressed before responding to commenters.

This message contains the comments you submitted and the resolutions
to your comments. Each comment includes a link to the archived copy of
your original comment on
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/, and may
also include links to the relevant changes in the updated WCAG 2.0
Public Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/.

PLEASE REVIEW the decisions  for the following comments and reply to
us by 7 June at public-comments-WCAG20@w3.org to say whether you are
satisfied with the decision taken. Note that this list is publicly
archived.

We also welcome your comments on the rest of the updated WCAG 2.0
Public Working Draft by 29 June 2007. We have revised the guidelines
and the accompanying documents substantially. A detailed summary of
issues, revisions, and rationales for changes is at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/05/change-summary.html . Please see
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ for more information about the current review.

Thank you,

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact

On behalf of the WCAG Working Group

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 1:

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/449B9208.3080202@aol.com
(Issue ID: LC-1330)

I have supported WCAG 1 and have implemented its guidelines in the
sites I build. The guidelines were relatively easy to understand and
implement.

My eyes glaze over looking at the massive volumes produced to explain
WCAG 2. Isn't the purpose of WCAG 2 to promote website accessibility?
If these bloated, dense, inscrutable texts are approved, WCAG 2 risks
becoming utterly irrelevant to small to medium web development shops.
Accessibility will suffer.

Let's do the right thing and rework these guidelines for usability.
We've got to make them easy for developers to understand and use.

Art Zoller Wagner       www.DigitalDesign.us

----------------------------
Response from Working Group:
----------------------------

We have reworked the entire document to make it shorter and easier to
read. This includes:
- Shortening the introduction
- Moving much of the discussion out of the guidelines and puttin it in
the Understanding WCAG 2.0 document
- Shortening the conformance section and moving it after the guidelines
- Writing simpler guidelines
- Removing as many technical terms (jargon) as possible, replacing
them with simpler language or their definitions
- Removing the nesting of definitions where we could (i.e. definitions
that pointed to other definitions)
- Moving information about mapping between WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 to a
separate support document (so it can be updated more easily)
- Creating a Quick Reference documents that has just the Guidelines,
success criteria and the techniques for meeting the success criteria.
- Trying to word things in manners that are more understandable to
different levels of Web expertise
- Adding short names/handles on each success criterion to make them
easier to find and compare etc.
- Simplifying the conformance section
- Using plainer language wherever possible (e.g. – use "Web page"
instead of "Web Unit")
- Eliminating several new or unfamiliar terms. (authored unit, etc.)
- Making the whole document much shorter.

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 23:28:11 UTC