Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft of December, 2007

Dear Mario Batusic,

Thank you for your comments on the 11 Dec 2007 Last Call Working Draft
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20071211). The WCAG Working Group
has reviewed all comments received on the December draft. Before we
proceed to implementation, we would like to know whether we have
understood your comments correctly and whether you are satisfied with
our resolutions.

Please review our resolutions for the following comments, and reply to
us by 31 March 2008 at public-comments-wcag20@w3.org to say whether
you accept them or to discuss additional concerns you have with our
response. Note that this list is publicly archived.

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 10 March 2008 at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-20080310/.

Note that if you still strongly disagree with our resolution on an issue,
you have the opportunity to file a formal objection (according to
3.3.2 of the W3C Process, at
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGArchiveMinorityViews)
to public-comments-wcag20@w3.org. Formal objections will be reviewed
during the candidate recommendation transition meeting with the W3C
Director, unless we can come to agreement with you on a resolution in
advance of the meeting.

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: Use of "disability" instead of "impairment"
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2008Jan/0051.html
(Issue ID: 2429)
Status: VERIFIED / NOT ACCEPTED
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

The word "disability" stresses a "dis"-ability and is negative. I
propose using "impairment" instead. An impairment is an objective
concept based on some physical, psychological deseas/injury. So also
"cognitive difficulty", "learning difficulty", ,"speech difficulty" is
better as disability. The concept of "disability" stands for a
misfortunate state of an impaired person, who lacks for some abilities
due to additional limitations/barriers in his/her physical or social
environment. Disability is exactly the state that we will overcome
through the implementation of these Guidelines.

Proposed Change:
General use of "impairment" instead of "disability"; use of difficulty
instead of disability in cases like: learning difficulties, cognitive
difficulties etc.

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

The choice of "disability" vs "impairment" is preferential.  In
general, the disability groups we have talked to prefer the word
"disability" to "impairment," so we actually changed impairment to
disability in many places.

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 2: Unnecessary extra Principle 4
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2008Jan/0053.html
(Issue ID: 2431)
Status: VERIFIED / NOT ACCEPTED
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

The concept of "robustness" is not intuitive understandable and will
be a difficulty for the most content-only authors. Also talking about
parsing in 4.1.1 etc. could be an additional problem for content-only
authors (non-technicians).

Proposed Change:
Move shortened versions of 4.1.1 and 4.1.2 somewhere under the
Principle 1, because a content that is not valid (according to an
recommended standard DTD) or not well-formed will possibly break a
User Client and/or Assistive Technology Software.

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

We considered this at one point, but these success criteria relate to
all of the previous principles, not just perception.  They also have a
different character.  In the end, we were unable to distribute them
and felt that they needed to stay here under the robustness principle.

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 3: The subject here does not affect an content author.
Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2008Jan/0054.html
(Issue ID: 2432)
Status: VERIFIED / NOT ACCEPTED
----------------------------
Original Comment:
----------------------------

This technical issue has nothing to do with a content author. This
criterion could be put into User Agent Accessibility Guidelines or
better in the Guidelines for User Interface Producers in CMS and other
complex Web systems.

Proposed Change:
Remove!

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

The author of the content may be generating the Web page via a Content
Management System or directly. In either case, the Web page must
satisfy SC 2.2.5 in order to conform to WCAG 2.0.

Authors will have an easier time producing WCAG-conformant web pages
via tools like CMS systems if those programs meet the Authoring Tools
Accessibility Guidelines(ATAG).

If the author is generating the Web page directly, it is the author
that selects the server services and who programs any JavaScript (or
other interactive technologies) in the page that might deal with this
success criterion.

Re-authenticating is not really in the power of the user agent to deal with.

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 00:20:10 UTC