Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft of May, 2007

Dear Andreas Granqvist,

Thank you for your comments on the 17 May 2007 Public Working Draft of
the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/). The WCAG Working Group
has reviewed all comments received on the May draft, and will be
publishing an updated Public Working Draft shortly. Before we do that,
we would like to know whether we have understood your comments
correctly, and also whether you are satisfied with our resolutions.

Please review our resolutions for the following comments, and reply to
us by 19 November 2007 at public-comments-wcag20@w3.org to say whether
you are satisfied. Note that this list is publicly archived. Note also
that we are not asking for new issues, nor for an updated review of
the entire document at this time.

Please see below for the text of comments that you submitted and our
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 WCAG 2.0 Editor's
Draft of May-October 2007 at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-20071102/

Thank you for your time reviewing and sending comments. Though we
cannot always do exactly what each commenter requests, all of the
comments are valuable to the development of WCAG 2.0.

Regards,

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

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Comment 1: How can GIF or JPEG be part of a baseline?
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007May/0141.html
(Issue ID: 1937)
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Original Comment:
----------------------------

I was reading about baseline technologies on
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/baseline/ and can not understand how Gif
and Jpeg could be a part of the baseline. Images can not be made
accessible in it self, you always need an alt-text on the image to
make it accessible and the alt are provided with html, not Gif or
Jpeg.

HTML, Flash, Scripts and PDF is accessible if it's made correctly, but
Gif or Jpeg can never in it self be accessible... You don't need to
explain an accessible PDF with HTML since the PDF can be read by user
agents, for example screen readers. You can access the PDF in an
accessible way on you´re computer, regardless if it is on the
internet or in Explorer, but an Gif can only be understood in a screen
reader if it is provided with an text, for example via HTML.

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

The document About Baselines and WCAG 2.0 is outdated; we have updated
the title to clarify that WCAG 2.0 Working Drafts no longer use the
concept of "Baseline" It has been replaced by the concept of
Accessibility supported technologies.

We agree that technologies such as gif and jpeg cannot be used alone
to create a Web page that satisfies WCAG 2.0. However, Web pages that
include such content can meet WCAG 2.0. The technique to satisfy a
success criterion such as SC 3.1.5 relies on content in gif and jpeg
format if the supplemental content is a visual illustration using that
format. Then the format must be accessibility supported. In this case,
that would mean that the format can be displayed by a visual browser.

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:05:02 UTC