Re: What happens when an evaluation statement already exists?

Hi Alistair,

A fundamental problem in your scenario is that you are checking for 
techniques rather than success criteria, which is the actual WCAG 2.0 
requirement. There is no WCAG 2.0 requirement for "scope" or even "table 
headers" for that matter. The requirement is "Information, structure, 
and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically 
determined or are available in text" (SC 1.3.1).

An evaluator needs to have the expertise to assess that. We tried to 
reflect that in section "Required Expertise":
  - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-EM/#expertise

So, detailed evaluation statements like the one you describe should be 
extremely helpful for evaluators, even if just to show them how the 
developers worked. However, evaluators are responsible for their own 
determinations. So, unless they have some way of identifying how 
reliable the evaluation statement is, they would need to be cautious.

I think this could be a helpful not directly under step 2 - something 
along the lines of "use whatever information you can get about the 
website, and evaluation statements can be gold mines where available".

Best,
   Shadi


On 19.5.2014 12:14, Alistair Garrison wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>

-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra - http://www.w3.org/People/shadi/
Activity Lead, W3C/WAI International Program Office
Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG)
Research and Development Working Group (RDWG)

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2014 17:34:35 UTC