Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Draft of April 2006

Dear Terry Thompson ,

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/20060620212838.9DAFC47BA1@mojo.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-835)

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

As a person who provides accessibility training to web designers, I\'m
afraid that many of the folks I work with, all of whom are strapped
for time and want quick-and-dirty recommendations (just tell me what
to do!), would not have the patience to deal with the daunting girth
of WCAG 2.0. This has grown enormously since I saw it last, and as
I\'m trying to wade now through the complete WCAG 2.0 package,
including supporting documents, I\'m frankly overwhelmed by the amount
of information that\'s presented here. I think this has more to do
with presentation than with content, and could be remedied with very
few changes to the actual content that\'s being presented.

Here\'s an example: I\'m coding in HTML and I want to find the WCAG
2.0 - recommended technique for marking up alt text on decorative
images. Here are the steps required for me to find what I\'m looking
for:

1. Open the WCAG 2.0 normative doc.
2. 4 principles - I select the most relevant.
3. 4 guidelines - I select the most relevant.
4. Four Level 1 success criteria - I read them all and find a relevant
success criterion, but still don\'t have a specific solution.
5. I follow the \"How to meet 1.1.1\" link, expecting to find techniques
6. Instead of techniques, the first thing I find is a repeat of the
Level 1 success criteria. Didn\'t I alredy read this?
7. Not one to give up easily, I read on, past a dozen or so
definitions of key terms, a lengthy \"Intent of this success
criteria\" section, then finally arrive at a section headed
\"Techniques for Addressing Success Criterion 1.1\".
8. Now I have an introductory paragraph, a paragraph of instructions,
and five situations that take a while to read through. My particular
situation is Situation E, but after reading it I still don\'t have a
technique that I can apply. (I\'m also distracted in this section by
the word USING always appearing in caps - is this done to enhance
readability? For me it has the opposite effect).
9. At last I arrive at \"Technology-Specific Techniques\", which is
where I find the answer I was looking for. As a sighted user with no
known cognitive disabilities and past experience with both WCAG 1.0
and 2.0, the entire exercise took about 20 minutes.

I suspect that at this late stage in WCAG 2.0\'s development cycle,
all of that verbiage between Step 1 and Step 9 is important, and is
not going away. However, it was *not* important for my purposes.

So, the problem: How can all of this information be made available,
but be optional to users? I think a more useful WCAG 2.0 would be one
that is simple and straightforward, with all information only a click
or two away.


Proposed Change:

I can think of two ways to address this problem.

1. Provide more links to the various components of the \"How to\"
sections in the Understanding document. Instead of showing me the
success criteria (again), and the key terms, and the scenarios, and
the techniques, link to each of these sections, so I can choose
whether or not to see them.

Personally I would even prefer to have this information linked
directly from the normative document, thus I could get to Techniques
in only a single click rather than two. However, that may have a
tendency to clutter up the normative document.

2. Develop a WCAG 2.0 Wizard. Present nothing but the four guidelines
on the opening page. Each time I select something, I\'m presented with
additional options. Without adding intelligence to this application, a
wizard wouldn\'t reduce the number of steps, but it would greatly
reduce the amount of noise and make the WCAG 2.0 experience less
daunting.

The number of steps could be reduced by adding intelligence to the
wizard. Perhaps a keyword search, supplemented with some additional
options to help filter the results (e.g., search any of the following:
All WCAG 2.0 documents, Success Critera only, HTML Techniques only,
CSS Techniques only, etc.)

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

Thank you for your comment. We had a similar concern.  We think we
have addressed this issue with the Quick Reference.  It provides all
the guidelines and success criteria along with sufficient techniques
to meet them.  The full technique descriptions are thus just one click
away.  You can find it at  www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/.

There are also plans in conjunction with Education and Outreach
Working group to develop an application note providing the basics for
making accessible content in HTML.

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 23:44:56 UTC