Re: New AU Draft Recommendations

Authoring Tool Guidelines WG:

Good to see the new AU guidelines working draft. 

I encourage other AUWG members to take the time to go through this draft
and comment to the list as soon as possible, as well as to discuss the
draft on the phone meeting that Jutta has arranged for the 13th. We need to
move this forward, and need your help to do so.

My comments follow. 

Regards,

Judy

Generally:
1. The document outline is a great improvement over previous drafts and
more comprehensively addresses the issues.

2. The format is inconsistent from item to item in the document: there is a
mix of guideline, rationale, and technique for each item, sometimes in
different order. To be consistent with the evolving WAI guidelines format,
use: broad categories; and within those, simple guideline statements,
followed by a brief rationale, followed by available techniques to
implement that guideline; leaving technical details of implementation to
appendices. The best example of this format presently is the WAI Page
Author Guidelines Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH. 
Examples of problem areas in the current AU draft, where there is not a
clear guideline/rationale/technique statement:
  3.B.4 rationale is too long, and there is no technique or example
  3.C.1 there's a guideline, a restatement of that guideline, some
rationale, then more guideline
  3.C.2 a definition (which should be covered in the definition section up
front), more definition, then two very different guidelines, the second of
which is a critical issue that should not be buried.

3. The guidelines themselves should be as directly stated as possible. Use
the active voice (actually, the imperative -- start each guideline with a
verb), which has more impact, and is easier to understand and translate
than passive voice (see 3.C.4). For instance, replace:
  "3.A.3 All inaccessible markup must be exposed"
with:
  "3.A.# Expose all inaccessible markup"
and replace:
  "3.B.3 Help examples should include accessibility solutions"
with:
  "3.B.3 Include help examples in accessibility solutions"

4. Keep the tone objective. There are some sections that sound like opinion
rather than guidelines (3.A.5 "If proper integration is neglected...
authors will be likely to treat the recommendations with equally little
regard" and some sections that sound negative (3.A.5 "When a new feature is
added... in a careless way" or special note at 3.C "boring,
repetitive..."). It's possible to convey the same information in a more
objective way: "Integration of an accessibility-related feature into the
pre-existing user interface increases user acceptance."

5. Eliminate use of "Special Notes": if these are in fact valid and
necessary pieces of information, just make them part of the introduction to
a section. 

6. Several of the guideline items seem to actually be several items rolled
into one. For instance, 3.A.4 includes recommendations for
accessibility-checking strategies in site management tools, alerts for alt
text in image editors, and encouragement for descriptive text in video
editors.

7. Use "Web" instead of "WWW" to be consistent with W3C style.

8. I recommend "Universal Design" over "Universal Access" since the latter
occassionally gets confused with the "Universal Service" concept in
telecommunications. But perhaps this issue has already been discussed by
the WG.

9. The title of the core of the document seems odd. Why is it called
"Guidelines for Accessible Document Production" (sounds like the page
author guidelines) rather than "Guidelines for Development of Web Authoring
Tools that Support Accessibility" or something like that?

10. For the note at the beginning of the document, wouldn't it be clearer
to say "This document provides guidance on the development of Web authoring
tools which produce accessible Web pages, consistent with the 'WAI Page
Authoring Guidelines.'"

11. At 2.1, Markup Authoring, Conversion and Generation Tools, I don't
understand the last paragraph which states that these guidelines don't
address generation tools, but that the guidelines apply to generation
tools. I recommend that these guidelines directly address generation tools
as well as the other two. In addition, why not include site management
tools, image-editors, video-editors, and multimedia authoring tools to the
extent that those tools have accessibility-related issues for development
of Web content? You already cover many of the issues in the guidelines
you've written to date.

12. At 2.5, add "or structured tree view" to the examples of different
views (such as the Amaya authoring capabilities support)

13. At 2.7, is it necessary to define these two items?

14. At 3.A.1, this isn't just related to the page author guidelines; I
think you also need to include a list of all the accessibility-related
features in HTML4, CSS2, SMIL, etc. since the page author guidelines
includes multiple and sometimes alternate techniques for guideline items.
These can be pulled out of the /WAI/References/html4-access & /css2-access,
or Ian may be working on a listing. If we don't list the items to
implement, we shouldn't expect the engineers who're developing code to take
more trouble than we have to find the items & make sure they understand the
purpose & issues involved in implementing them.

15. At 3.A.2, what's the difference between the first and the third bullet?

16. At 3.A.4, what is a "serious, effective, and uniform manner"? I'm not
sure that an authoring tool engineer would find that clear or helpful.

17. At 3.B.2, at "the justifications should also address", for the first
item (aging) please add "hearing and cognitive" (actually, statistically in
that age bracket I believe new hearing loss is greater than the others);
and for the second item please add cognitive. (and what's the WAI
Justifications Document? the business-case-to-be?)

18. 3.B.4 great!

19. 3.C.1 2nd P is scrambled; and this one needs an example or technique
pointer.

20. 3.C.3 Critical point, but needs to be more clearly stated.

21. References: CSS1 - isn't there a non-date specific URL for this? should
be.

#end


At 03:08 PM 9/29/98 -0400, Jan Richards wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>A new draft guideline has been placed on the the site:
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/
>
>Please send any comments, revisions, etc. to the list.
>
>Jan Richards
>ATRC
>jan.richards@utoronto.ca
>
>
----------
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE3-355, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

Received on Friday, 9 October 1998 00:15:05 UTC