- From: Loretta Guarino Reid <lorettaguarino@google.com>
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 21:50:09 -0700
- To: "Jonathan Chetwynd" <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
- Cc: public-comments-WCAG20@w3.org
Dear Jonathan Chetwynd, 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 ---------------------------------------------------------- Comment 1: Include people with learning disabilities in developing standards Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jun/0091.html (Issue ID: 2001) ---------------------------- Original Comment: ---------------------------- Re: W3C Process and WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft 17/05/07 Why do we need to include people with learning disabilities or low literacy in creating web standards? One in five people in the UK is functionally illiterate. to each one of you that remains concerned, Users need to be involved in the development of standards, including but not limited to WAI standards. This is the structural fault within W3C process that needs to be resolved. It is not sufficient to rely on the well intentioned and excellent intellectual prowess of developers. They create to suit their own and their corporate needs. User groups need to include people with low literacy and learning disabilities. Corporations and developers need to test their products with users, but amazingly in an email today, a director of one of the largest web corporations advised me they do not include users in their development process. The evidence is that after more than a decade there are no easy to use tools for independently publishing HTML, SVG or other W3C technologies. I have already written to Ian, Tim, Chris and others to state this case. regarding WCAG2 in particular: whilst it is true that I attended the conference calls, I did not agree the outcomes. we were limited to discussing a paragraph that has subsequently been significantly diluted in intent**. it can be found as the last paragraph in the introduction here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#intro regards Jonathan Chetwynd Accessibility Consultant on Learning Disabilities and the Internet 29 Crimsworth Road SW8 4RJ 020 7978 1764 http://www.eas-i.co.uk **or as Joe wrote "...the ostensibly open process of the W3C actually isn't open: It's dominated by multinationals; the opinions of everyone other than invited experts can be and are ignored; the Working Group can claim that "consensus" has been reached even in the face of unresolved internal disagreement; invited-expert status has been refused or revoked; the process is itself inaccessible to people with disabilities, like deaf people; WCAG Working Group chairs have acted like bullies. The "open" W3C process simply didn't work. We tried something else." http://wcagsamurai.org/errata/intro.html --------------------------------------------- Response from Working Group: --------------------------------------------- The working group welcomes participation from all people, and wishes that we had more active participation by people with a wide range of physical and cognitive disabilities. It is true that the workload on this committee is very heavy, and this is felt by all of the participants. To help address this the working group exposes our working draft to the public so that all those without the time to participate in a weekly basis can still openly comment to the draft as it evolves. Regarding coverage of people with cognitive disabilities: [The spectrum of cognitive issues is quite wide. When we look at the guidelines through the eyes of different kinds of cognitive issues we find many Success Criteria that help many different kinds of cognitive disabilities. In general there are many Success Criteria whose primary target may be people other disabililites which also give substantial improvement of accessibility to some people with cognitive issues also. For instance, some forms of dyslexia prevent people from using a mouse. For those people, every Success Criteria that makes the web site keyboard accessible is a benefit. Some people with cognitive issues may benefit from have headings which are programmatically determined because they may use a User Agent which takes advantage of Heading levels. Guidelines that prevent the web site from changing focus unexpectedly help some people with cognitive issues. Guidelines that extend timeouts help some people with cognitive issues who are slower to respond. Contrast and flashing related guidelines help some people with cognitive disabilities. 4.1 makes sure all content of the site meets level one or at least provide the content in a technology which does conform. ] We realize that there is still much to do. The explanation that WCAG 2 does not address all the needs of people with cognitive, learning, and language disabilities was added to be clear about the limits of these guidelines. We added some best practices for cognitive, learning, and language disabilities as advisory techniques, and three new success criteria in this area. We continue to encourage your comments and suggestions on how to improve the current draft.
Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:50:22 UTC