OAA and EARL

ERT WG:

As you know, I co-chair the Open Ajax Alliance Accessibility Tools Task
Force (http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Accessibility) along with Rich
Schwerdtfeger. Besides the goal of publishing a set of standardized,
machine-readable validation rules that embody the success criteria of WCAG2
and that are readily-consumable by all tool venders, we have the mission of
developing reporting best practices for generating such validation reports
based on the execution of these rules against web content and dynamic web
applications. In such a report, we would certainly want to include the tool
that executed the validation rules, the test subject (i.e. the web content
or application being tested), the test criteria, and, most importantly, the
test result, which would include the outcome of the execution of a given
rule along with information about how to locate offending parts of the
content or application. As you know, this is even more problematic for
dynamic content in which there is no way to specify detailed information
about offending structures without reproducing the HTTP exchanges that led
to the violation.

Needless to say, this is precisely the type of information that the EARL
vocabulary was meant to represent. The problem we have is that producing
RDF documents is a tedious task in the context of a browser environment and
in JavaScript, the primary language of the OAA task force. Indeed,
consuming RDF is tedious as well and, when we began to construct our
validation rules for validating WAI-ARIA-related roles and properties, we
represented the semantics of WAI-ARIA (which is currently modeled in RDF)
in JSON. I have attached that file for your convenience (with the extension
changed so as not to have it deleted by email systems or applications).

We would like to know whether or not the ERT WG would be open to permitting
the serialization of EARL reports in JSON (and possibly other formats),
leaving the RDF as the modeling mechanism for the vocabulary. We believe
that many more accessibility tool venders would be open to the utility of
EARL if reports were generated in this format and that reports would be
more readily consumable by applications wishing to permit alternative
presentations and aggregations of reports. Please let us know your thoughts
and if you think this is a feasible approach.

(See attached file: aria_definitions.js.txt)

--> Mike Squillace
IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center

W:512.286.8694
M:512.970.0066

External: http://www.ibm.com/able
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