RE: STILL Open--48-Hour Consensus Call: Request to reconsider Alt Techniques Location

Can we remove the reference to MS Word?  There's a discussion in WCAG about whether it applies, and I'd like to leave it out until that's resolved.

-----Original Message-----
From: Janina Sajka [mailto:janina@rednote.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 1:29 PM
To: Sam Ruby
Cc: HTML Accessibility Task Force
Subject: Re: STILL Open--48-Hour Consensus Call: Request to reconsider Alt Techniques Location

Hi, Sam:

Sam Ruby writes:
> On 02/21/2012 02:19 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:
> >Colleagues:
> >
> >Inasmuch as this 48 hour consensus was called on a Friday afternoon 
> >in front of a 3-day U.S. holliday weekend, the call is still open. 
> >Please feel free to respond until end of business Boston Time on 
> >Wednesday, 22 February.
> 
The extension relates to whether Steve's CP gets TF consensus backing.
Is there some other issue here?

> Despite this extension, the chairs have decided to proceed with 
> publishing their evaluation of the Change Proposal as it exists
> today:
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0293.html
> 
1.) I don't see the very first item the CP mentions being considered. Was it? namely, relevance to many technologies, not simply HTML? Did you have a position on that?

2.)	The CP asserts a systemic problem for which the cited bugs are
illustrative. I see your response on the individual bugs, but not on the global question. In fact the assertion, as I understand it, is that escalating these individually is counter-productive and unlikely to achieve the needed remedy, a systematic elimination of specific illustrative guidance in the HTML specs. We assert the specs should define lexical markup, not authoring guidance, as the evidence--since calendar year 2007--suggests this guidance is often unsatisfactory, and historical efforts to correct it have been frustrated. Were we then to escalate each individual issue, it's highly likely we would achieve reasonable results on some, but there's no basis for an expectation that all would be properly addressed. Hence, no escalation on on individual issues because of the historical pattern, and rather the request to defer to the appropriate guidance document--which exists because of the history, as the earlier CP pointed out.


3.)	The April decision suggested a new WCAG might be grounds for
reconsideration. The CP points to how that was a misunderstanding of WCAG, and how current work actually satisfies the suggestion the Chairs reached last April, howbeit from incorrect reasoning. Is there a response for this here somewhere that I'm missing.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis, but I think these are three major misunderstandings between the CP and the analysis cited.

Janina


> - Sam Ruby

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Received on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 22:20:15 UTC