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

Dear Luc-Rock,

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: Removal of Testability Requirement for certain elements
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jul/0157.html
(Issue ID: 2353)
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

After reading the "Testability Costs Too Much" article
(http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testability), I have come to the
conclusion that testability should not be a requirement for all
guidelines.

Proposed Change:
Allow certain guidelines to be without a "testability" requirement, as
these "soft" guidelines are often very useful to Web designers and
encourage people to create more user-friendly pages, even if the
guidelines are somewhat subjective.

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

Thank you for your comment.  We also struggled under the testability
constraint, but in the end, the W3C cannot ask authors to conform to
something (or expect them to include the standard in purchases or work
orders) if the authors
cannot tell when they have met the criteria.  It is important to
remember two things:

1) That these are base standards for accessibility.  The starting
point that authors should do.

2) WCAG includes both requirements (success criteria) and
recommendations (guidelines and advisory techniques).

  - Only the requirements (success criteria) and the sufficient
techniques need to be testable (and this can be machine testable OR
human testable OR a combination of both).

  - The guidelines themselves as well as the advisory techniques do
not need to be testable and they contain much guidance and information
on how to make a page accessible that goes beyond what can be tested.

Thus, WCAG provides a roadmap both for those who only want to (or only
will) do what is required as well as for those that are interested in
knowing what to do, without needing to be required to do it.  The
former have a list of "to do's" that they can be given and held
accountable for.  The latter have a rich listing of advice on things
to consider that would make things more accessible.

We hope to find people interested in putting together an application
note that is specifically targeted at Cognitive, Language and Learning
disabilities and that organizes all the information in this area in a
manner that does not worry about testability, and presents all ideas
in a simple straightforward manner.

If you are interested in helping on this, please let us know.

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 04:58:48 UTC