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

Dear Liddy Nevile,

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: metadata and WCAG 2.0
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007May/0137.html
(Issue ID: 1957)
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

This is a response to the comments made about my issue with WCAG 2.0
wrt metadata.

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/20060614003228.646BD33205@kearny.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-799)

Unfortunately, I did not provide a detailed issue report and I
suspect my comments have been misunderstood by the WG.

A new ISO standard for accessibility metadata, known as the
AccessforAll metadata and also worked on by IMS GLC, the European
community, the Dublin Core community, and others, makes it possible
to significantly improve the accessibility of the Web by adding
appropriate, standardised metadata to resources. This metadata is
carefully designed to completely avoid any ideas of 'conformance' and
simply advise on the characteristics of the resource that may be of
relevance to the INDIVIDUAL user. This means that an individual can
determine if the resource is suitable for them, regardless of its
conformance to any standards. It also makes it possible for systems
that take account of individual user's needs and preferences and
makes it possible for such systems to discover versions of resources
that will suit the individual user.

The metadata being proposed is necessary for individual selection of
appropriate resources, does not have any impact on conformance and
therefore is not likely to cause many of the problems that
conformance metadata might, and has been designed to work as part of
the general accessibility approach taken by WCAG, in full recognition
of WCAG. It should be noted that there is nothing technology-specific
about the metadata schemas being recommended and such metadata is
fully extensible and works for both generic and proprietary
technologies.

It is fairly clear that if metadata of the type suggested is included
in the WCAG requirements, many more people with accessibility needs
and preferences will be able to use many more resources of use to
them, making the Web in general, far more accessible.

I urge the WG to consider this work in more detail and at least to
discuss it with one of the editors of the AccessforAll metadata
standards. I personally consider that to not include metadata of this
type in WCAG would be a retrograde step and continue the problem with
WCAG that the new metadata approach was designed to overcome: while
conformance with WCAG is a good practice and helps deal with the bulk
of problems for many people, WCAG does not and cannot cater for the
specific needs and preferences of an individual user who needs to
know if the resource has what they need and prefer, whatever else it
does or does not have for other people.

I note that although the new metadata approach was developed for
education, it is generally applicable, and is so considered by the
Dublin Core metadata community.

For further details, please see:

http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility (a number of documents available)
http://jtc1sc36.org/doc/36N1141.pdf (a nearly final version of the
standard to be released very soon by ISO)
http://dublincore.org/groups/access (a generalised approach to
AccessforAll metadata)

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

The working group recognizes that proposed metadata structure can
potentially be beneficial to people with disabilities, technology
developers, and content authors.   We have added metadata into WCAG in
a couple of ways, but we are not adding a success criteria requiring
metadata.  It turns out that there two flaws in the logic that
counterindicate this.

1) If content meets all the other SC already (including using metadata
to meet the other SC) then adding a new SC requiring additional (not
required for conformance) alternatives be linked by metadata is
requiring metadata links to do things that aren't required.

2) If content met the other SC but the author wanted to provide a
special alternate version (which did NOT meet WCAG but did provide a
particularly accessible version for a particular disability) and the
author didn't use metadata to link to it (the author provided links on
the page instead) then the page would fail even though the new content
wasn't needed to meet WCAG and even though there was a self
explanatory link right there that would take a user to the alternate
version.

Our conclusion was that Metadata was a very powerful technique for
doing certain things but that, like other technologies, we didn't want
to specify it too tightly in the SC.  Instead we would like to focus
on it in the techniques to meet other success criteria.

What we have done therefore is the following.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20071102/appendixC.html

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 2: low-literacy
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jun/0092.html
(Issue ID: 2002)
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

I agree that we have a problem that we have not yet managed to
address. I am currently in Cambodia working with the millions here,
and representative of them in many countries, who are not only low-
literacy but second language people whose own cultural communities
will not for many years produce web content for them and so they are
reliant on, for example, English content. We are part of the One
Laptop Per Child Project and that project alone will give millions of
children and their families connectivity within a very few months but
sadly, they will not be able to access content that is suitable for
them because it will not be identified as low-literacy (a lack of
metadata) and not designed to be transformed for low-literacy.

I am really shocked by the lack of accessibility for these
communities and  consider it quite a high priority, especially as in
many cases it also means critical health, safety, .....

Liddy

On 13/06/2007, at 7:37 AM, ~:'' ありがとうございました。
wrote:

>
> 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:
---------------------------------------------

We agree that issues with low literacy and second languages are a
barrier to many people, but unless they are a due to cognitive,
learning, or language disabilities, they are outside the scope of WCAG
2.0. We hope that improved support for people with these disabilities
will also benefit the wider audience, including those with low
literacy.

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:57:31 UTC