Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Jeremy Walker ,

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/20060606172929.3887566368@dolph.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-754)

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

This document in its current form is an embarrasment to the W3C, and
is a step backwards from the previous version.  If made official, it
will set back years of work by accessibility-focused web developers.
Futhermore, by releasing this horrible standard you will hurt the
prestige of the W3C as a standards organization; I for one will put
significantly less stock in any body that produces works as flawed as
this one.  Please re-consider your plans to officially deploy this
document, and send it back for some serious re-working.

Proposed Change:

There is so much wrong I don\'t even know where to begin ... Please
see the excellent article by Joe Clark on A List Apart for more
details:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2/

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

We received a great deal of input on the last call draft and have made
a large number of changes including a rewrite of much of the draft to
make it easier to understand. We have also included a new quick
reference document that provides a tool for practitioners who just
want the bottom line on the requirements and the techniques for
meeting them in different technologies. We also shortened the
Guidelines document considerably.

Here are some of the things we have done.

Easier language to understand
- Wrote simpler guidelines
- Removed as many technical terms (jargon) as possible replacing them
with plainer language or, where possible, their definitions
- Eliminated several new or unfamiliar terms. (authored unit, etc.)
- Removed the term Baseline and replaced it with "web technologies
that are accessibility supported" and then defined what it means to be
accessibility supported.
- Removed the nesting of definitions where we could (i.e. definitions
that pointed to other definitions)
- Tried to word things in manners that are more understandable to
different levels of Web expertise
- Added short names/handles on each success criterion to make them
easier to find and compare etc.
- Simplified the conformance

Shortening the document overall
- Shortened the introduction
- Moved much of the discussion out of the guidelines and put it in the
Understanding WCAG 2.0 document
- Shortened the conformance section and moved it after the guidelines
- Moved mapping from WCAG 1 to a separate support document (so it can
be updated more easily)

Creating a Quick Practitioner-oriented Summary / Checklist-like document
- Created a Quick Reference document that has just the Guidelines,
success criteria and the techniques for meeting the success criteria.

Joe Clark also submitted his article as a comment. You may also want
to review the working group's responses to that comment.

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 23:36:39 UTC