Fwd from Brian Hardy: Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft of December, 2007

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brian Hardy <Brian.Hardy@visionaustralia.org>
Date: Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 6:09 AM
Subject: RE: Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft of December, 2007
To: Loretta Guarino Reid <lorettaguarino@google.com>
Cc: Sofia Celic <Sofia.Celic@visionaustralia.org>, Andrew Arch <andrew@w3.org>


Loretta

 Thank you and the other WG members for the careful consideration of my
 comments.


 I look forward to your foreshadowed response to the Comment 9:
 Conformance Level wrong for SC 2.2.2.
 This problem of blinking text causing some people with learning
 disabilities to become fixated was raised with me by a group of special
 education teachers at one of our web accessibility workshops. There were
 several in the group from different schools and all shared this belief.


 I remain very concerned about your response to Comment 4: Conformance

Level wrong for SC 1.4.3
 I understand that it is possible for knowledgeable and skilled users to
 overcome this problem using operating system or User Agent

'highlighting' or 'contrast' tools/features to create high contrast
 text, but this is an unnecessary and unreasonable burden to place only
 on users with disabilities.

 In the world of access to physical buildings, under Australian law, it
 is not acceptable in a new building to have the wheel chair access via
 the rear loading bay, down a smelly back alley, just because the
 architect thinks ramps look ugly. Access has to be through the front
 door (or near by).

 This principle of disability access not requiring special effort by the
 user (unless it is impossible or unreasonably expensive) should apply in
 the web. It is easy (and good usability practice) to make websites with
 reasonable contrast. As the Web Accessibility Initiative we should be
 saying this clearly by setting the success criteria at level A, not
 Level AA.

 In the built environment, sufficient contrast between say walls and
 floors is a requirement, with the same status as other access
 requirements. Users with moderate vision impairment need this to move
 around safely. They could overcome designs with poor contrast by always
 having to use a cane, but this is seen as an unnecessary burden when it
 is possible and easy to maintain good contrast in the built environment.
 I believe these same arguments apply on the web. Good contrast on web
 pages is easy to do and highly beneficial, so the SC should be at level
 A Conformance.



 I am not sure you have understood my point about Acronyms (Comment 13:
 Missing Success Criteria - Acronyms).
 I know Acronyms were included in the definition of abbreviations. The
 difficulty is that the success criteria do not address the problem that
 screen readers have with understanding how to convey the meaning
 correctly by an appropriate voice rendering. This is a completely
 different issue to the need to expand abbreviations.  I still believe
 that adding an additional success criterion, along the lines I
 suggested, would be an important improvement.

 Pronouncing your ESP example as a "word" would make the content hard to
 understand, even if in the first incidence of the "word" it had been
 fully expanded. In common speech, each letter of ESP is pronounced and
 it should be the same for screen reader users reading web content.

 It is easy to enable assistive technology to identify acronyms and
 pronounce each letter (if that is appropriate).



 Thanks again for the Working Group's hard work and patience in dealing
 with the concerns that practitioners in the field have had with the WCAG
 2.0 drafts. I hope the WG will reconsider the response to the two items
 I have highlighted above and to my comments on blinking content.



 Regards

 Brian Hardy

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 00:17:23 UTC