Idea that began with what to do with A.0.1

Hi everyone,

Several of the commenters had trouble with the current organization of 
A.0.1 (which in fact still has a temporary number).

I've been trying to think what to do about this and it seems to me that 
a change here could be part of a larger "tweaking" of Part A.

So here's the idea:


1. Move "Guideline A.4: Authoring Tool User Interface must be Access 
System Friendly" up to the top and rename it:

"Guideline A.1: Authoring tool must facilitate access by assistive 
technologies"


2. Move A.0.1 under this reworked guideline with an explanation that one 
of the aspects of WCAG conformance is better communication with the user 
agent "platform" and the assistive technologies that it communicates with.


3. Split the "Success Criteria sections" of all of the checkpoints in 
the existing Perceivable (new A.2), Operable (new A.3), Understandable 
(new A.4) guidelines into 3 groupings (where applicable - since not all 
checkpoints will have all three types of success criteria):

   (a) Success criteria for *user interface "chrome"*
   (b) Success criteria for *rendered content display*
   (c) Success criteria for additional authoring support

I think this would have benefits in terms of clarity and might also be a 
structure that we could approach the UAWG about using (For them the 
third item could be something like "Additional browsing support SC").


4. We could then tighten up the old A.0.1 wording to make it clear that 
conforming to WCAG usually satisfies the SC's for *user interface 
"chrome"* and *rendered content display* but not the "SC for additional 
authoring support".


5. This has the happy side effect that we can tighten up some wording in 
A.2.9 (the "preview" checkpoint) that has been bugging me: "the preview 
meets all of the checkpoints in Part A.". This made less sense when our 
success criteria included authoring related things but with these broken 
out into their own SC category, we can be more specific that we meant 
SC's for *user interface "chrome"* and *rendered content display*.


Optional 6. We might also consider bringing in a reference to UAAG as 
JUST ONE OF THE OPTIONS (ie. conforming to UAAG would not be necessary) 
for conforming with the SC's for *user interface "chrome"* and *rendered 
content display* but (as with WCAG) not the "SC for additional authoring 
support". (I suggest this because authoring tools built on browser 
rendering engines might be interested in killing two birds with one stone)


Thoughts?



Cheers,
Jan

Received on Tuesday, 30 January 2007 20:30:07 UTC