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

Dear Noah Slater,

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: Testability is dramatically hurting the WCAG
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jun/0234.html
(Issue ID: 2067)
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Original Comment:
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See: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testability

Letting testability remove plain English recommendations (such as the
lack of specification for descriptive ALT text because there is no
machine way to check for this) removes a considerable amount of value
from the WCAG.

If something does not change the working group stands to loose a great
deal of credibility regarding this massive issue.

Proposed Change:
Include additional recommendations along side the machine testable requirements.

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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 (the test points or checkpoints) 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 05:04:14 UTC