Action item re: B.2.4.3 Let user agents repair

Hi all, I had an action item to split up the proposed B.2.4.3 intent. In 
doing this, I wonder about adding marking things as "autogenerated" as a 
new normative note (since it is phrased as IF, it won't take effect 
unless the format has that mechanism). Any thoughts?

B.2.4.3 Let user agents repair: After the end of an authoring session, 
the authoring tool does not attempt to repair alternative content for 
non-text content using text values that are equally available to user 
agents (e.g., the filename is not used). (Level A)
Note: If a web content technology includes a mechanism for marking 
alternative content as automatically generated, then that mechanism is 
employed to mark any repairs performed after the end of an authoring 
session.


And then here is the rephrased intent:

TECHNIQUES: INTENT:
The intent of this success criterion is to address situations in which
an author has either not noticed or ignored opportunities for adding
alternative content and has ended their "authoring session". ATAG 2.0 
does *not* require authoring tools to attempt automated repairs in this 
situation because doing so risks misleading accessibility checking tools 
and end users into the assumption that the alternative content was 
either provided or approved by a human author. However, if developers do 
want to provide automated assistance to end users, then this success 
criterion specifies what types of repairs may be provided.
1. Basic *text* processing repairs using information that is equally 
available to user agents (e.g., file name, text metadata within non-text 
objects, the title of a linked resource, etc.) are *not* allowed, 
because they are best performed by user agents and assistive technologies.
2. Repairs are allowed when authoring tools have contextual information 
(e.g., the image is the author's profile picture) that user agents do 
not have equal access to.
3. Repairs are also allowed that go beyond simple text processing to
directly processing images, audio or video. The intent here is to 
encourage, rather than discourage progress in these rapidly advancing

The intention of the note regarding marking automatically generated 
repairs is twofold. First, such autogenerated markup would provide 
information to user agents and assistive technologies that might be used 
to inform their end users. Second, by marking repairs as automatically 
performed, it enables authoring tools to flag the repairs as tentative, 
requiring author human approval in a subsequent authoring session, in 
order to remove the automatically generated marking.



-- 
Jan Richards, M.Sc.
User Interface Design Lead
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto

   Email: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
   Web:   http://jan.atrc.utoronto.ca
   Phone: 416-946-7060
   Fax:   416-971-2896

Received on Monday, 31 August 2009 19:17:23 UTC