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

Dear Nathan Ketsdever,

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: minimum text size
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007May/0138.html
(Issue ID: 1935)
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Original Comment:
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Document: W2
Item Number: (none selected)
Part of Item:
Comment Type: technical
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):

Text font size seems to be a fundamental accessibility issue.  For
instance, Yahoo Beta's Mail system is in 10 point, which makes it
harder for older folks to access and use its site.

I may have missed it in the document, but a mention of a text size
minimum seems to get at the foundation of what your goal is.

Second, speaking to disability seems fundamental to the issues you are
talking about.  Accessibility is not just for able-bodied folks.

And speaking to these issues is critical to respect, human dignity,
equality, and social justice concerns.

If I am remiss in anyway, please forgive.

Proposed Change:
Above.  Add a line about text size and a section on disability.

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

We do not require a minimum, as no universal lower limit would be
appropriate. We do, however, require that text be resizable, and the
"understanding document" for that provision illustrates how, for that
to happen, the author needs to specify text size using a measure which
is readily resizable based on its parent or container size (i.e not pt
or px), based on this and the usual initial font-size value of
'medium', it is possible in most browsers to adequately control the
text size. This would allow users to scale the font to the size that
works well for them. We would also note that we do intend to add an
advisory technique for this section which requires large fonts by
default.

As a technical specification, it is somewhat outside of the scope of
the guidelines to include in-depth information describing disability
and the social issues that surround it. We do, however, include a
general discussion of the types of disabilities addressed by the
guidelines in the introduction as well as links to WAI resources
introducing Web accessibility. As well, the Understanding documents
include more specific information about how the WCAG 2.0 provisions
benefit individuals with disabilities.

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2007 05:03:03 UTC