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

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

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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