Re: ERT Action Item: Use Case Scenarios for EARL

Hi,

The idea is not to create a new logo but rather to provide a mechanism
to supplement the logo with an EARL report of what has been tested.
Browsers or search engines could then also process this information.

Of course, like the logos, these EARL reports may be outdated, over
claimed, or simply false (policing their proper usage is a different
issue and out of scope for this WG). However, EARL reports would provide
more credibility and granularity than the logos (e.g. "I've tested these
checkpoints, therefore I claim Level-? conformance" or "Except for these
? checkpoints, I have passed all other checkpoints for conformance
Level-?" etc).

We would need to work out a bunch of details of how to bind EARL reports
to the Web pages but that shouldn't be too difficult (we can pick out a
few ideas from RSS for example).

What do people think of the overall idea?

Regards,
  Shadi


-----Original Message-----
From: public-wai-ert-request@w3.org On Behalf Of Carlos Iglesias
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 12:59
To: Giorgio Brajnik; Charles McCathieNevile
Cc: Johannes Koch; public-wai-ert@w3.org
Subject: RE: ERT Action Item: Use Case Scenarios for EARL



 

I agree with the idea of EARL report(s) as a more articulated and
complete way to communicate that the website is accessible to a certain
extent, the problem is that EARL is a machine readable language and it's
not intended to be readable for people.

IMO this is the reason for not to use it in "a new accessibility
conformity logo" instead the one that is usually linked to
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1A-Conformance.html.en due to this claim is
visible for all web users and EARL is for developers, not for web users.

Regards,

CI.



> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: Giorgio Brajnik [mailto:giorgio@dimi.uniud.it] 
> Enviado el: viernes, 01 de abril de 2005 10:08
> Para: Charles McCathieNevile
> CC: Carlos Iglesias; Johannes Koch; public-wai-ert@w3.org
> Asunto: Re: ERT Action Item: Use Case Scenarios for EARL
> 
>  >> Johannes said
>  >>
>  >>> So the EARL report has to be created and linked to the logo.
>  >>> It will not be a link to some on-the-fly test like with  
> >>> HTML/CSS validation.
>  >>
>  >>
>  >> And so we will have a link to some static EARL report 
> (probably  >> incomplete and not updated) which doesn't add 
> nothing new compared to  >> the current static claim text.
> 
> The fact is that the EARL report is (necessarily) a static 
> file, that refers to a snapshot of the website.
> But the same is true though for the posting of the 
> conformance logo, or any other sort of accessibility claim 
> *about the website*. The only way out is to claim something 
> about the processes that govern the evolution of the website 
> (authoring, changing, publishing), which I think is beyond our scope.
> 
> In my view the EARL report(s) is simply a more articulated 
> way to communicate that the website (at a certain moment in 
> time, and a certain set of pages and their contents -- i.e. 
> time and space) is accessible to a certain extent.
> 
> I agree completely with Chaals.
> 
> Best regards
>          Giorgio
> 
> Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:37:33 +1000, Carlos Iglesias 
> > <carlos.iglesias@fundacionctic.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Johannes said
> >>
> >>> So the EARL report has to be created and linked to the logo.
> >>> It will not be a link to some on-the-fly test like with HTML/CSS 
> >>> validation.
> >>
> >>
> >> And so we will have a link to some static EARL report (probably 
> >> incomplete and not updated) which doesn't add nothing new 
> compared to 
> >> the current static claim text.
> > 
> > 
> > In this worst case (crappy tools used stupidly) we will 
> have a link to 
> > a  report that once justified what was claimed. Even this is an 
> > improvement,  as it lets us see the basis for the original 
> claim. If 
> > we set a minimal  set of properties for EARL (see my response to 
> > Giorgio) we would kow  things like when the page apparently 
> met some 
> > requirement, according to  whom. Lots more than with the 
> current use of a logo alone.
> > 
> > Tools like AccMonitor, that cover very large websites 
> monitoring many 
> > aspects daily, could readily produce daily updates for whatever is 
> > tested.  This in fact showsone of the possible benefits of 
> EARL - it 
> > become easy to  analyse what is going wrong across a site, using 
> > output from a variety of  QA tools (accessibility testing, guided 
> > manual testing, validation and  other stuff). That isn't 
> specific to 
> > EARL, it is the value of a  standardised reporting language in 
> > general. Just that there aren't any  with real adoption at 
> the moment...
> > 
> > cheers
> > 
> > Chaals
> > 
>

Received on Monday, 4 April 2005 11:14:48 UTC