W3C terminology (was Re: Rephrasing Universal Access Design Principle)

At 12:43 +1000 UTC, on 2007-08-04, Jason White wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 01:42:18AM +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
>> Given all the miscommunication due to different uses of terminology, let's
>> try to take extreme care with that terminology, especially in something like
>> the Design Principles.

[...]

>> <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AccessibilityConsensus
>> #head-2d72a19043f78d471af365031ec3ab94fe62d1af>
>
> This is reasonable terminology, noting however that WCAG 2.0
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/wcag20/) now uses "alternative" rather than
>"equivalent"
> to designate the content, as in the first of the above three senses.

Hrmpf... Thanks :)

OK, as I had hoped, W3C has a glossary: <http://www.w3.org/2003/glossary/>.
Not very useful though. I looked up
"accessibility" -> 2 relevant different results (1 from ATAG 1.0)
"universality" -> zero results
"alternative" -> 6 relevant results (5 from ATAG 1.0, 1 from UAAG 1.0)
"equivalent" -> 4 relevant results (all from ATAG 1.0)
"alternate" -> 2 relevant results (1 from ATAG 1.0, 1 from CSS 2.0)

But all are uses of the terminology, or at best a definition within one
specific spec. No W3C-wide definitions. Depressing.

OTOH, one could argue that that gives us more freedom to define them. The
meaning of "accessibility" seems to be well enough established within W3C to
exclude those without disabilities. But I'd say that the other terms we can
define without conflicting with W3C as such. It might even be useful to other
groups if we do define them.

I've taken the liberty to start a glossary
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/Glossary> and put short versions in it of the
definitions I had put in the AccessibilityConsensus document
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AccessibilityConsensus>. Not that I'm entirely
happy with all of them. There's room for improvement.

It seems to me there will be a need to make these more official, because
consumers of the HTML5 spec will also be confronted with these terms. So I
guess they'll at some point need to go directy in the HTML5 spec.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2007 07:42:48 UTC