Update on schedule and process

In this week's call I was asked to bring a couple things to the editors group. 

First, there was the idea of an introduction to the guide doc materials, along the lines of what Tim proposed in his submission for 2.5 L 2 SC 2 [1]. The editors agreed that this is a good idea, and to some extent had already planned for it. When we get all this stuff into XML, a suite of document will be published with an intro page. They took us up on the idea that each guide doc should link back to the intro page, and they have a pointer to Tim's proposed content to get started on wording.

Second, there was the question of timings, given what the team task force work statement [2] says. It is clear that none of the teams will complete their work in that time frame, and the editors group spent time thinking about prioritization. We need to work as fast as we can, and to get us into the Last Call stage, our current goal, there are only certain materials we need to have ready. To exit Candidate Recommendation stage we will need to have more material, but we worry about that later, right now we just want to get into Last Call. So here's what is most important for each guide doc:

* Key terms
* Intent
* Sufficient techniques (general and technology-specific)

Everything else - advisory techniques, benefits, additional resources, test cases - is nice to have but optional. If we have it, great, but if not, we'll live without it. We should not spend time working on those pieces. We also only need to provide the minimal information to be understood by an educated audience. For sufficient techniques, if just a title in the guide doc will be understood, that's all we need. We only need to provide actual worked out techniques if a) we already have them or b) that truly is necessary for reviewers to understand what we meant, because the title can't be made clear enough.

We'll go over this in our next call. This means that our "bottom up" work has lower priority now. I'd like to ask those of you who were focusing on techniques and test cases, not to spend more time developing them, but simply thinking about what techniques are sufficient for each of our success criteria. That can be from the harvest materials we have [3] and from Sophia's work [4], or others you think of. Please post your thoughts to the list so the people doing guide doc materials for each success criterion can incorporate that. The list of people working on guide doc materials for each success criterion is at [5].

I would like to have drafts of guide doc materials for all our success criteria that meet these requirements available by our next call to review. We can discuss each of them and either suggest more refinement or go to survey. Hopefully we can then soon turn our attention to another success criterion.

I'm sure many of you will have questions about how this affects the publication date for the next draft of the guidelines. I don't have an answer, but it is on the agenda for tomorrow's call so hopefully we'll all know then.

Michael


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wcag-teamc/2005Sep/att-0028/guidedoc1.htm
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2005/09/teamtf.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2005/06/30-tech-harvest.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wcag-teamc/2005Sep/0013.html
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/09/12-wcag-teamc-minutes.html#ActionSummary

--- Signature ---

Michael Cooper
Accessibility Product Manager, Watchfire
1 Hines Rd Suite 200, Kanata, ON  K2K 3C7  Canada
Tel: +1 (613) 599-3888 x4019
Fax: +1 (613) 599-4661
Email: michaelc@watchfire.com
Web: http://www.watchfire.com/

Received on Wednesday, 21 September 2005 14:47:22 UTC