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

Dear Grant Broome,

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: no provision for link highlighting
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jun/0062.html
(Issue ID: 1980)
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Original Comment:
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Document: W2
Item Number: (none selected)
Part of Item:
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: No provision for link highlighting
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):

currently there is no provision in the guidelines to ensure that those
who are partially sighted, or have mobility impairments can be
provided with a high-visibility highlighting mechanism for links and
controls. Currently browsers only provide a thin dotted line which a
significant number of disabled web users find difficult to see. This
could be regarded an issue for the User Agent, but I'm not sure that
there is even a user agent guideline for this.

Proposed Change:
A new guideline could be included that guides developers towards
providing greater visibility for links using CSS techniques. This of
course may seem like a radical, not to mention very late change, but
the benefits to so many groups of disabled people are great. Consider:

 *partially sighted visitors who cannot use a mouse.
 *websites which present colour schemes and images that do not present
the default highlight very well.
 *those with athetosis, who often find it difficult to focus on small
areas of the screen.
 *older arthritic web users

I've also written about this here:

http://grantbroome.blogspot.com/2007/06/whats-missing-from-wcag-20.html

I'll leave it in your capable hands.

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

4.1.2 already requires that the focus be programmatically
determinable, so AT can be used to provide highly visible highlight.

In addition, we are adding an advisory technique to provide a highly
visible highlighting mechanism for links and controls. (SC  2.4.3 and
2.4.7 and 2.4.11 )

We also have a sufficient technique
"Using the default focus indicator for the platform so that high
visibility default focus indicators will carry over".

We have also added a sufficient technique
"Using an author-supplied, highly visible focus indicator".

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:30:58 UTC