Re: What happens when an evaluation statement already exists?

I have read and re-read you reply, and I don't really understand the direction of your response.  It does not appear that we are talking about the same subjects…

My core question is "Have you ever created a web page and tested it with different tools?  Did you get the same results?"


To be super clear… 

All I am saying is that respect should be paid to the WCAG techniques, and their directly associated checks, a developer implements in order to make their web pages accessible.  

If not, you will get the situation where a single wide-scale monitoring tool is developed which tests certain specific things, and in order to comply all web developers naturally start to make their web pages accessible in exactly the same way.  Which is not what WCAG is about...

Alistair

On 20 May 2014, at 09:41, Ramón Corominas wrote:

> From the "Techniques for WCAG 2.0" document:
> 
> "Please note that the contents of this document are informative (they provide guidance), and not normative (they do not set requirements for conforming to WCAG 2.0)."
> 
> The only normative document is the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation, so you cannot tell anyone that you have to use a particular technique to check the accessibility of a website. Techniques may -and will- change in the future due to new technologies or methods, varying accessibility support, wrong concepts or any other circumstance.
> 
> Of course, any WCAG-related evaluation procedure must ensure that WCAG 2.0 itself is met, taking into account that conformance can be reached through many different ways, provided that they are accessibility supported; indeed, WCAG Conformance comes from meeting the 5 Conformance Requirements, and the Success Criteria are indirectly pointed from them.
> 
> If a website owner claims conformance and the website is in fact WAG 2.0 conformant, the method used to assess this should be irrelevant. If a particular method to assess WCAG 2.0 conformance states that a conformant website is non-conformant, there is a flaw in the method, and not in the website or in WCAG.
> 
> That said, it is true that sometimes we may disagree about the interpretation of certain important things, such as the required degree of accessibility support, the applicability of conforming alternate versions or other things that can lead to different results.
> 
> Of course, these differences can be very important from a legal perspective, but I assume that WCAG 2.0 is a technical document, not a legal one, and if someone cannot access and a discrimination exists, it doesn't matter if you claim conformance, and you cannot excuse the discrimination because "technically" you meet the guidelines.
> 
> In any case, overimposing a precedence on the techniques used to evaluate (not the techniques used to develop) could lead to owners claiming conformance but not conforming to WCAG 2.0, and then pretending that you must use *their* techniques to evaluate, not yours. For example, they could say that they used the keyboard (without a screen reader) to check keyboard accessibility, but if I check with the screen reader running maybe the website is completely unusable. Should I agree with the claim just because they did not test a real world case? Must I consider this website accessible?
> 
> In conclusion, I am totally against any imposition that gives more precedence to a particular evaluation procedure, of course provided that the evaluation methods follow the WCAG Recommendation.
> 
> Regards,
> Ramón.
> 
> 
> Alistair said:
> 
>> If I say I have used this set of techniques, and I have undertaken all associated checks, I would not want to be told that I did not conform because I did not use another set of techniques - possibly bound together in some monitoring tool.  Or, think about two EU states using slightly different monitoring tools - which conflict.   Having chaired the Evaluation Methods Task Force for the EuroAccessibility Consortium, and a similar European task force in the initial WABCluster I can say that such conflicts are the rule, rather than the exception. So, a concrete proposal for an addition to step 1.d would be:
>> "If documented evaluation procedures are provided along with an evaluation statement or WCAG 2.0 conformance claim, the documented evaluation procedures provided should take precedence over any other evaluation procedure when undertaking an evaluation."
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2014 09:28:04 UTC