thoughts on agenda topics

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:15:20 +1100, Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org> wrote:

Since I can't make the call, here are my thoughts on the topics raised.

> AGENDA:
> 1. Reflections on EARL from CSUN

Is there a report written up somewhere yet?

>   - EARL "Business Case" may need some work

The "business case" needs to have a clear audience. I know of some real  
business cases where customers have demanded something like EARL and so it  
has been implemented. This is typicaly easier to explain in terms of large  
organisations with reasonably advanced record-keeping and transparency  
processes.

There are a number of other applications which have nothing really to do  
with accessibility. And some which are tangentially related - tracking  
conformance to the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, or support for  
various HTML and CSS features in browsers, are both relevant to  
accessibility work, although are really general QA-type work. They are  
also closely enough related that it should be easy to explain the value of  
a common reporting format designed for ready merging of information.

>   - EARL reports as justification for accessibility-logo usage

This is old news, no? Or is it that people liked this idea?

> 3. Conformance to EARL
>   - how do developers know they conform to EARL?

We could add some more OWL, or we could just tell them what we expect as a  
minimum. We could also publish a SPARQL query that we expect to provide  
results - that way, running the query over an EARL statement would tell  
you if there is "syntactic conformance" - that is the query gets a  
meaningful answer. Somebody needs to check that the answer actually says  
what the developer meant to say, of course. But that should be a one-time  
process.

>   - could we build EARL test-files around WCAG techniques?
>   <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/>

Sure. The "Task" bits are pretty much defined as something that can be met  
or not. Of course it would be helpful to have some published URIs  
representing each task. (And to have some commitment from the WCAG group  
to maintain the list of URIs. It is not essential - anyone in the world  
can do it instead, but it is helpful if it is the woking group. Especially  
when it comes to declaring that some test has replaced some other test...  
).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 22 March 2005 11:09:42 UTC