Wombat Checkpoint Reordering Proposal

Hello all,

Recent AUWG discussions of implementation and evaluation techniques for
Wombat seem to reveal shortcomings in the ordering of the guidelines. In
an attempt to rectify this, I (with some help from Matt May) am making
the following reordering proposal:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/2002/07/22-wombatreorder.html

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The primary thrust of the proposal is to organize the seven guidelines
into four "Tiers" that will build successively upon the ones before.

- Tier 1 includes those guidelines that address ways to ENABLE
accessible content production, but which do not actively support or
promote it (from the author perspective).
=> Implementation Techniques for these guidelines involve reference to
W3C language recommendations and to WCAG.

- Tier 2 builds upon Tier 1 by including those guidelines that address
ways to actively SUPPORT accessible content production by prompting,
checking and documenting.
=> Implementation Techniques for these guidelines general strategies
(see Prompting appendix), the AERT, and general themes in WCAG.

- Tier 3 builds on Tiers 1 and 2 by addressing the manner in which the
Tier 1 and 2 checkpoints should be integrated with the tool.
=> Implementation Techniques for these guidelines involve User Interface
integration ideas.

- Tier 4 builds upon Tiers 1, 2 and 3 by addressing the accessibility of
the user interface of the tool, as a whole.
=> Implementation Techniques for these guidelines involve third-party
platform-specific guidelines as well as access-friendly authoring
interface mechanisms.

*NOTE 1*: This step-upon-step approach is the way that I tend to explain
the document to others. But up until now, it was not made explicit by
the document structure. 

*NOTE 2*: Grouping the "Guidelines" into "Tiers" means that the wording
of guidelines may remain essentially the same as it was in ATAG 1.0. The
checkpoints will likely still need to be fine-tuned.

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Several minor changes were required for the reordering to work:

- The order of Guidelines 1 and 2 will need to be switched to place the
choice of output format and the production of valid markup first, as
precursors for the rest of the ATAG requirements.

- The order of Guidelines 5 and 6 will need to be switched, since
Guideline 5 (dealing with integration) is actually a modifier for
Guideline 6 (dealing with documentation) in the current Wombat draft.

- Note that checkpoint 5.1 is now numbered 6.X. This was done because I
believe the checkpoint is now unnecessary.

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Cheers,
Jan

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Jan Richards

User Interface Design Specialist
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
University of Toronto

@: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
P: (416) 946-7060
F: (416) 971-2896

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Received on Monday, 22 July 2002 14:44:41 UTC