Re: OAA and EARL

Hi Michael,

Thank you for checking-in and for pursuing compatibility with EARL.

ERT WG is certainly open to serialization of EARL reports in different 
formats, although we may need to look more closely at the conformance 
section (it is a good timing for comments on this):
  - <http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Schema/#conformance>

Maybe one way could be to change the conformance requirement for EARL 
reports from "valid RDF" to "valid RDF or another EARL serialization" 
and develop a Working Group Note for the JSON serialization, if someone 
from your group would be willing to edit that Note?

I think that as long as there is a common set of descriptions in the 
report and at least one common format between the tools to exchange 
these descriptions, then we have met our basic goal of having easily 
exchangeable data between different testing tools.

Best,
   Shadi


Michael A Squillace wrote:
> 
> 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
> Internal: http://w3.ibm.com/able

-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra - http://www.w3.org/People/shadi/ |
   WAI International Program Office Activity Lead   |
  W3C Evaluation & Repair Tools Working Group Chair |

Received on Tuesday, 10 November 2009 08:54:17 UTC