What happens when an evaluation statement already exists?

Dear All, 

Let's say I'm a website owner and I follow specific techniques in order to create a website which, as far as I know, is compliant.  I make a claim to this effect, after evaluating the website and creating an evaluation statement (which details which checks I have done, from the techniques I have followed).  

Now let's say a national monitoring project checks my website, but their conformance model is based on a different set of techniques, and of course checks.  

After their checks the monitoring project say that according to their evaluation my website fails - maybe one or two things.  Really only due to the mismatch between techniques e.g. I used the headers attribute technique to make tables compliant, whilst they only checked for scope, etc…

Would I have to change my website? This seems a little silly… 

My question is then - what happens when a proper evaluation statement already exists?

I think we have spoken around this subject a number of times, but there is no clear advice that I can find in the methodology.

My hope would be that if the evaluation statement has been made properly and is up-to-date, any further evaluations undertaken (with or without the knowledge of the website owner) should in some way respect the techniques followed and the way in which the page has been evaluated - especially if the further evaluations are to be used for monitoring, etc…

Otherwise, I worry that the techniques and their checks selected in outside evaluations, especially monitoring evaluations, will start to constrain the techniques which developers can follow - which is at odds with WCAG 2.0. 

I would suggest that the most likely area for discussion on this subject is step 1.d.

Anyway, interested to hear your thoughts and comments.

All the best 

Alistair

Received on Monday, 19 May 2014 10:14:36 UTC