EARL and Website Production Management Techniques

Hi,

One use case for EARL, is to use it as an aid for better website
production management. Managing websites is in some respects similar to
maintaining software, only that the development process and change
frequency is much higher.

Because of this, it may be a barrier to achieve web accessibility, that
good process tools for managing accessibility issues are not available
on a broad basis.

One possibility for better management of issues found during
accessibility assessments, is to add EARL support to e.g. BugZilla, to
be able to add and track bug reports for accessibility issues
automatically.

The idea seems good, but there are several questions that need to be
addressed before such a solution can be made in practice. Like e.g. on
what granularity do you file bugs? (page, web-site, WCAG checkpoint...)
How would/should such a bug report be represented? (text page, annotated
copy of original page or what.) How do you define severity of the bug?

On the other hand, having good EARL support in BugZilla for
accessibility issue management might be a selling point for tool
vendors, and may be contributory for EARL adoption because BugZilla is
widely used. It would also provide a summary of the bug reports in a
standardised way, so that an accessibility aware management could
compare the evolvement of the web site with other activities like
software development, to get an overview over how the web site
progresses, and if there are indicators of "accessibility rot" - e.g.
bugs that never are corrected and addresset etc.

What are your viewpoints on this?

Mvh.
-- 
Nils Ulltveit-Moe <nils@u-moe.no>

Received on Saturday, 16 April 2005 19:57:03 UTC