- From: Loretta Guarino Reid <lorettaguarino@google.com>
- Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:20:41 -0700
- To: "Ramón Corominas" <ramon@ramoncorominas.com>
- Cc: public-comments-WCAG20@w3.org
Dear Ramon Corominas, 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 ---------------------------------------------------------- Comment 1: Level A for low or no-contrast content Source: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2008Feb/0027.html (Issue ID: 2479) Status: VERIFIED / NOT ACCEPTED ---------------------------- Original Comment: ---------------------------- I've read the rationale about not moving this criterion to Level A, arguing that "assistive technology will be able to present the text or text equivalent of this content to the user". However, for people with no assistive technology (because they don't really need it, or even for people with good sight), when the text has no contrast (or very low contrast), the content will not be perceived, or even noticed. I think that when people doesn't even notice that there is some content that they should be aware of, they will not even think about using some kind of trick to find it, so the content will not be perceived at all. It would be the same as if this content does not exist. An example of this here: http://ramoncorominas.com/wcag20/level_a_1_4_3.htm I am conscious that this is an exaggerated example, but I, as visually impaired, sometimes find things like this, where there is a content that I don't even know that exists. Sometimes I "discover" this kind of content when a well-sighted friend tells me about its existence after some navigation trying to find it through a site (an example of this are some form controls with no border, over a very light gray background). Proposed Change: Raise 1.4.3 to Level A, or introduce some Level A rule to force this kind of content perceivable without assistive technology. --------------------------------------------- Response from Working Group: --------------------------------------------- We considered this at length and we have left 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) at level AA. Since there are ways to make text high contrast, and we expect new ones to become available in the future, we did not require it at Level A (to make up for user agent features) due to the restrictions it places on color palettes. Users with contrast perception difficulties may be able to set a custom style sheet with !important on the font color choices, so even though they're not using assistive technology they can customize their presentation to get a higher contrast presentation. In your example, the text at the end of the page would not be visible to anyone, which would make the page no less usable for people with disabilities than without. While we realize that your example represents an extreme, we have not found that examples of real-world sites which contain significant barriers of this nature. In a review of a variety of popular Web sites, we only found a few places on a couple of pages where 5:1 was not met.
Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 00:20:55 UTC