Re: Conformance question

Jon,

An example of a tool which seems to already meet all the checkpoints of
guideline 7 (disclaimer: I have not had time to exhaustively test it, but
what I could test and the author's claims both suggest that it does) is
asWedit, available from advasoft - http://www.advasoft.com.au

Although I have not used it myself I believe that HoTMetaL 5 is very close to
this point. There are other tools which meet it but do not necessarily meet
all the others - emacs is a pretty common example in the Unix world.

Any developer (or third party) is free to to a test of which checkpoints a
tool meets, and to publish it. Indeed, as a sample of how such a test is
done, and an indication of how a particular class of tool (a WYSIWYG editor)
can meet the checkpoints, we have provided a conformance test for amaya,
which spells out which checkpoints it meets, and which it does not.

To claim conformance to the guidelines a tool is required to meet the entire
set of requirements for the level of conformance claimed. The group has
decided against enabling conformance claims for tools which remove some of
the barriers to accessibility, which is not to say that tools which only meet
some of the barriers are not worthwhile, just that there are other barriers
that are faced by people with disabilities.

Although the example I cited earlier, asWedit, is pretty close to double-A
conformance overall, there are requirements which it does not meet, and it is
therefore not conformant (at any level). Whether this takes two weeks or two
yeras to fix is beyond the control of the working group, but the things that
it does not do are things that other authoring tools do, so the requirements
do not seem to be impossible to meet.

Regards

Charles McCathieNevile

On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Jon Gunderson wrote:

  Gregory,
  My problem with the one type of conformance is that it will only idenitify
  tools which comply to all checkpoints.  I am assuming that it may take a
  long time for authoring tool developers to understand and to comply with
  many of the checkpoints in guideline 7 and until some developers do there
  will be no tools that conform.  I hope I am wrong about developers interest
  in accessible tools, but based on the AU discussions it is a controversal
  issue and acceptance of it maybe slow by developers.  But again I hope I am
  wrong about developers interest and priority of adding accessibility
  features, especially if only one level of conformance is maintained in the
  guidelines. 
  
  So in the mean time tools that produce accessible markup can only be
  identified through trial and error.  This will mean alot of work for me and
  other people to identify tools which produce accessible markup to recommend
  to authors (in my case instructors on the UIUC campus) to produce
  accessible web materials.  If there were two levels of conformance then it
  would be a lot less work for me and other people to identify a tool
  capabilities.  Naturally I would like to recommend tools that produce both
  accessible mark up and are highly accessible to people with disabilities,
  but many authors have strong preferences on tools may not care about
  accessibility of the tool (unfortunatley I think this may be the majority
  of web authors and hopefully something WAI and other groups can help
  reduce).   
  
  The advantage to me and others like me who want to recommend tools to have
  two levels of conformance is basically:
  
  1. More timely information on a tools capabilities related to accessibility
  
  2. Potentially gives authors more choices on tools that produce accessible
  markup.  Many authors have strong preferences and giving them choices
  improves the chance of them using tools that create accessible markup.
  
  I am in total support of the goal of having accessible authoring tools and
  accessible markup, I am just stating my interest in how the guidelines
  conformance statement can help me in improving the accessibility of Web
  materials on the UIUC campus.
  
  Jon
  
  
  Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
  Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
  Chair, W3C WAI User Agent Working Group
  Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
  University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
  1207 S. Oak Street
  Champaign, IL 61820
  
  Voice: 217-244-5870
  Fax: 217-333-0248
  E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
  WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
  		http://www.w3.org/wai/ua
  		http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
  

--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 Thursday, 23 September 1999 04:29:47 UTC