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

Dear Andrew Clarke,

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: simplify "alternate forms in different modalities are provided"
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007May/0129.html
(Issue ID: 1931)
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Original Comment:
----------------------------

I would be grateful if you could simplify the following as found in

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)
Principle 1,
Guideline 1.1
1.1.1 Non-text content,
3rd point CAPTCHA
 Text reads "....alternate forms in different modalities are provided...."

Could you simplify this by being a bit more verbose...

...different modalities? Do you mean using different methods or
technologies to provide the content to accomodate different disabilities,
if so, say so.

There may also be a technical issue here in that providing those different
methods of representing the content may compromise the security of using
CAPTCHA in the first place and so render it useless. Thinking like a
miscreant, if I can exploit an accessibility method used to represent this
content to bypass the security of that content, then I probably will.

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

We have adopted your recommendation in the Success Criteria as follows:

"If it is to confirm that content is being accessed by a person rather
than a computer, then text alternatives that identify and describe the
purpose of the non-text content are provided, and alternative forms of
CAPTCHA using output modes for different types of sensory perception
are provided to accommodate different disabilities."

Regarding the security issues of requiring different forms of CAPTCHA,
we spent a lot of time considering the pros and cons of allowing
CAPTCHA. We believe that in today's environment it is necessary to
encourage accessible CAPTCHA, and we think requiring different forms
is the best way to approach the accommodation of people with varying
disabilities.

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:08:03 UTC