Proposed ATAG Partial Credit (fwd: from Barry F.)

From: 	Barry Feigenbaum <feigenba@us.ibm.com>

I brought this up at the Austin Face-to-face and again recently.

As implementing all the ATAG 2.0 guidelines, even in a minimal way, may
prove to be too expensive/time consuming for all tool vendors, we need a
way for authoring tools to get credit for conformance to parts of ATAG
without total conformance (i.e., get "partial credit"). This would
encourage tool vendors to try to conform where they can without having
to climb such a steep hill for the full breath of compliance. I propose
that this be done based on individual guidelines (we don't want to get
to granular at a formal conformance level).   The tool can claim support
of ATAG in total at some level (A, AA, AAA) if it supports all
guidelines at the matching level (all guidelines met at  the claimed
level) and/or individual guidelines of ATAG (i.e., each ATAG guideline
will be like a separate spec to conform to).

IMHO many vendors will stress guideline 2, then guideline 1; both of
which have great value to the industry.  Guidelines 3 & 4 will get less
priority.

Example A:
Guideline 	                     Claimed Conformance Level
                               (can use ATAG Guideline Conformance Icons)
1 Tool accessible 	                         AA
2 Produce accessible content 	                AAA
3 Support author 	                          A
4 Promote accessible solutions 	                 NC (nonconforming)

The above tool could not claim ATAG 2.0 conformance but it could claim
ATAG 2.0 GL1 and 2 with advanced conformance (IMHO still a pretty good
achievement)


Example B:
Guideline 	                     Claimed Conformance Level
                               (can use ATAG Guideline Conformance Icons)
1 Tool accessible 	                          A
2 Produce accessible content 	                AAA
3 Support author 	                          A
4 Promote accessible solutions 	                  A

The above tool could claim full ATAG 2.0 conformance and can also claim
ATAG 2.0 GL 2 with AAA and 1, 3 and 4 with A conformance.

Both of the above tools can use the ATAG 2.0 icons (we will need ones
for each guideline) in tier product literature.

Individual tools may also state that they support individual checkpoints
or even individual success criteria on their website/literature, but
this is not included in an AUWG sanctioned format.



Barry A. Feigenbaum, Ph. D.
Worldwide Accessibility Center - IBM Research
www.ibm.com/able,
w3.austin.ibm.com/~snsinfo
voice 512-838-4763/tl678-4763
fax 512-838-9367/0330
cell 512-799-9182
feigenba@us.ibm.com
Mailstop 904/5F-021
11400 Burnet Rd., Austin TX 78758

W3C AUWG Representative
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Sun Certified Java Programmer, Developer & Architect
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Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 19:39:55 UTC