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

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

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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