Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Chris W ,

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/20060525223314.BA77B47B9F@mojo.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-644)

Part of Item:
Comment Type: GE
Comment (including rationale for proposed change):

To set the scene, I am your average garden-variety web developer. I am
a simple soul, with college education, good English skills and above
all, good HTML skills. I spend all day, every day, producing sites -
for everything from the local dentist to the multi-million pound
nation-wide high street chains.

WCAG 2 has disappointed me.

For a start, I just don\'t understand it. I am not stupid, but I just
don\'t understand how it applies to what I build. How can I bear all
that in mind when going through the stages of
planning/building/testing a site?

It\'s going to take months to combine that into my daily routine and
to be honest I cannot see the commercial benefit. Most of the sites I
build, I make them WCAG 1 level 2 accessible out of good practice and
for good karma. I like it; I enjoy the sense of responsibility I get
from it. It sets me apart from the monkeys knocking sites out in the
back bedroom.

WCAG 2 is so difficult, why would I bother? My customers do not care!
If they do, then they will have to pay me a lot to have a compliant
site, as the extra amount of time involved does not come for free.

If WCAG 2 was actually simple - a simple to understand a plain-English
check list (i.e. - do you use PDF, see page 3, if not continue to page
4 > checklist) along with highly automated checking system, then we
are going to see a lot more developers producing compliant sites. Just
dream…an internet with more and more compliant web sites. Is that not
what we all want?


Proposed Change:

----------------------------
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 23:29:43 UTC