Re: Comments on Guidelines 2.3 and 2.4 of 17 June AU Guidelines

my comments interspersed - look for IJ and CMN

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Ian Jacobs wrote:

  Reference document:
       http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WAI-AUTOOLS-19990617     
  
  1) Checkpoint 2.3.2: Change "is conformant to" to
     "conforms to". Make this change globally.
  
  2) Checkpoint 2.3.3: Change "are conformant to" to
     "conform to".
CMN Done
IJ  
  3) Guideline 2.4: In intro text, rather than say
     that text equivalents are "absolutely necessary", just
     explain why they are important: they may be rendered
     as speech, braille, and visually. Change the second
     sentence to read something like "Since producing
     text equivalents can be a time-consuming task..." and
     then merge with the second paragraph. For example:
  
     "Textual equivalents, including "alt-text", long 
      descriptions, video captions, and transcripts make
      multimedia content accessible since text may be
      rendered as speech, braille, and visually. [Add
      more rationale here if desired, stealing from
      WCAG.] Since producing text equivalents can be a
      time-consuming task, authoring tools should
      assist the author with mechanical tasks (such as?)
      and help the author ensure that text equivalents
      accurately convey the functionality of
      the related multimedia object.
  
  4) Drop "This will lead to an increase in the
     average quality of descriptions used." I don't think
     this prediction is necessary, in particular because
     just before it there are four good reasons to include
     pre-written descriptions. What does "average quality"
     mean?
CMN I agree with your principles here. I will leave it for this draft,
because I think the point raised by WIlliam that it might be worthwhile
discussing the use of non-text alternatives is also valid, and I think we
should wait at least to see what the WCAG group comes up with on those lines
this thursday.

IJ  
  5) In checkpoints 2.4.2 and 2.4.3, change "information"
     to "markup".
CMN It doesn't make sense in 2.4.2 - the author should be prompted for
information, which may or may not be markup. It may make sense in 2.4.3 but I
think not, for the same reason. Noted issue for the group (this is part of
the "how do we define content, markup, etc question).
IJ  
  6) In checkpoint 2.4.2, language changes are mentioned.
     How does the tool know when the language changes in
     the document? If known automatically, the tool should
     insert the markup itself. If not known automatically,
     it can't alert the user when the information is missing.
CMN THe technique (now slightly modified) says that if there are changes in
the character set used, prompt the author to identify possible changes in
language. It is also possible to ask the author straight out whether there
are changes in language (or abbreviations, etc) within the document - Bobby
does stuff like this. If you think the example is a bad one we can remove it,
but I have let it stand for now.
IJ  
  7) Checkpoint 2.4.5: change ", which" to "that".
CMN Done     
     
  
  
  -- 
  Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
  Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Monday, 21 June 1999 01:13:24 UTC