WCAG 2.0 Comment Submission

Name: Jason White
Email: jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au
Affiliation: 
Document: W2
Item Number: Conformance
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
The editorial note to conformance requirement 4 points out the difficulty that

can arise with technologies which do not permit this requirement to be

satisfied. Limitations regarding an author\'s content or server that can be

removed by changing server-side configurations or altering content should not

be regarded as constraints that prevent the implementation of this requirement

however, as these can all be overcome (in the second case by changing the

design of the content and in the first case by securing the cooperation of the

server operator, if the server operator is not the author of the content).



With these remarks having been made, however, there remains the possibility

that a given technology, or combination of technologies, in which a Web page

is written may not provide the necessary mechanism to meet requirement 4. This

possibility is addressed in the following proposal.

Proposed Change:
If it turns out that some technologies do not permit requirement 4 to be met,

then split the requirement into two alternative cases.



Case 1: Where the technologies used to implement the non-conforming content

support the provision of such a mechanism, stipulate that a mechanism of the

kind stated in Requirement 4 as currently drafted, must be provided.



Case 2: where requirement 4 as currently proposed cannot be met, specify the

following weaker requirement:



The non-conforming page is part of a set of Web pages, at least one of

which provides a mechanism to obtain an alternate, conformant version.



Obviously, this mechanism would itself have to satisfy conformance

requirements, and the wording currently used to describe the mechanism

captures this intent perfectly, and should be carried over into any revised

draft. Note that the term \"set of Web pages\" is already defined in the

glossary and used elsewhere in the guidelines, and thus can be employed here

without introducing any new terminology or concepts.

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 04:07:39 UTC