Splitting 3.2

Hello all,

In an earlier posting I suggested splitting the requirements of 3.2 out
into three checkpoints (*). If this is done, the checkpoints under the
sub-section "Guiding the author to produce accessible content" will be:

3.1 Prompt the author to provide equivalent alternative information.
3.2* Assist the author to create structured content.
3.3* Assist the author to separate information from its presentation.
3.4* Assist the author to ensure device independent control.

Plus two checkpoints that pertain exclusively to 3.1.

3.5 Do not automatically generate equivalent alternatives...
3.6 Provide functionality for managing, editing, and reusing equivalent
alternatives...

--

HOWEVER, because the issues flagged in 3.1 to 3.4 also appear as part of
WCAG (see below), this may be perceived as an attempt by ATAG to
override the priorities set in WCAG

(1) equivalents for non-text [WCAG1.1, 1.2]
(2) structured documents [WCAG 3.1]
(3) independence of content from presentation [WCAG 1.3]
(4) device independent control [WCAG 2.1]

Specifically, would we be ignoring some other issues (such as
consistency, language clarity, etc.) that WCAG has been careful to
include?

On the other hand, if we did include all of these other issues we would
lose our abstraction from WCAG.

On the other hand (is that three hands?), we may decide that tools need
not "guide" authors on these other issues, since the tools must
"generate", "check" and "help correct" them, already (doubtful).

The way out of this might be to recondense 3.1 to 3.4 into a truly
general checkpoint that relies on WCAG to define *accessible authoring
practices* and on makes use of our SPECIALIZED definition of *prompt*:

3.X Ensure that when markup or content is added by author, the author is
*prompted* to follow *accessible authoring practices*. [Relative
Priority]

This may sound big and scary, but perhaps this could be minimized by
stressing that the prompting should be "unintrusive" in the rationale.

Thoughts?

-- 
Jan Richards, User Interface Design Specialist
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), University of Toronto

  Email: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
  Web:   http://ultrajuan.ic.utoronto.ca/~jan/jan.html
  Phone: 416-946-7060
  Fax:   416-971-2896

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 11:58:51 UTC