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

Dear Mike Sullivan,

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: There is no SC governing the visibility of focus
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jul/0238.html
(Issue ID: 2358)
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

There is currently no requirement in WCAG 2.0 Draft that the current
focus be visible. While the default behavior of showing focus can and
should be the responsibility of the user agent, it is possible through
CSS to defeat this and have links render without the default halo or
any other visual feedback. As a practical example, when examining a
site that sells ring tones
(http://nextelmedia.sprintpcs.com/NextelDigitalLounge/personalization.do)
I found that as I tabbed through the Ringers categories (and
elsewhere), there was no indication of which of the twenty-odd links
was selected. This page was extremely difficult for a keyboard user to
use, and yet there are no success criteria in the current draft of
WCAG 2.0 by which this aspect of the page can be said to fail, even at
the AAA level. (Since the functionality was technically available
through the keyboard, if you kept very careful mental track of the
number of times you tabbed, it passed the "2.1.1 Keyboard" success
criterion.)

Proposed Change:
Add a success criterion similar to the 508 rule 1194.21(c):

"A well-defined on-screen indication of the current focus shall be
provided that moves among interactive interface elements as the input
focus changes. The focus shall be programmatically exposed so that
assistive technology can track focus and focus changes."

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

To address the problem of the focus not being visible, we have added a
new success criterion:

"Focus Visible: Any keyboard operable user interface has a mode of
operation where the keyboard focus indicator is visible."

SC 4.1.2 already required that the state of user interface components
be programmatically determined, and that changes to the state be
notified. To make it  explicit that this addresses focus, we have
added a new failure:

"Failure of SC 4.1.2 due to the focus state of a user interface
component not being programmatically determinable or no notification
of change of focus state available"

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 05:02:05 UTC