Re: Warnings about access info loss (MS21)

On 3 Nov 2010, at 18:57, Alastair Campbell wrote:
> Is the proposed text reasonable then?
> "(b) Warning: if accessibility information required to meet the WCAG 2.0 success criteria will not be preserved in the output, then authors are warned (e.g., when saving a structured graphic to a raster image format). Authors may be allowed to set a preference to prevent the warning."

On the call Jan suggested an additional paragraph. I didn't get all of it down, but I think the gist was:
C) Live check of the output: The transformed content is checked by the tool, and the author is given specific warnings about the missing information.

There was some discussion about how complex this is, as there are several possible scenarios:
1. The source format may have some accessibility information (e.g. alt-text) and the target format does not support that (e.g. HTML to RTF, I think?).
2. The target format may support the accessibility information but the tool doesn't transform it.
3. The source and target formats support different accessibility information (e.g. HTML to Flash might support alt-text but not structure.)

In terms of information loss during a transformation, I assume our focus is where the target format does support the accessibility information, but the tool does not transfer it?

Perhaps a caveat would help?
"NB: If the target format does not support the accessibility information that could be transformed, this requirement does not apply."

Another angle mentioned to tighten this up was to ensure we are talking about a 'final' format, as we aren't interested in transformations before that. Except, perhaps we should be? If someone imports into a CMS from word, which saves it in an internal format (with information loss), then produces HTML, I would have thought that should be covered?

The current wording is:
"If the authoring tool provides web content transformationsthen one of the following are true:"

Perhaps we need a bit more in that initial setup?
"If the authoring tool provides web content transformations from a format with accessibility information to another format which also supports that accessibility information, then one of the following are true:"

Hmm, actually, I'm not keen on that, it opens up a big loop-hole if the target format doesn't support one little thing.

However, apart from that, the only thing I can think of is to turn 'will' into may in b):
"success criteria may not be preserved in the output", 

But that could lead to a lot of warnings...

-Alastair

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 22:08:05 UTC