Proposal on B.4.2.1 Model Practice (WCAG) in ATAG 2.0

Hi all,

After the discussion on the call yesterday, Jutta and I discussed things a bit more and I suggested beefing up the informative supporting info. Here is a proposal for doing that:

Current version: (http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/2011/ED-IMPLEMENTING-ATAG20-20110613/#gl_b42)

Challenges in setting a testable criterion:
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- online documentation can be modified or added-to by developers at any time
- documentation sets may be vast (thousands of pages) or very limited (even one page)
- while the accessibility of documentation can be (to some extent) checked automatically, checking whether documentation correctly models accessible practice must be done manually.
- theoretically, this situation lends itself to a statistical approach (e.g., testing a random set of documents from the documentation), but this is not very practical and inevitably would lead to questions about how the "random" set was selected.


Proposal: Link the term "range" to the new definition, but add context in the "Intent" 
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B.4.2.1 Model Practice (WCAG): A *range* of examples in the documentation (e.g. markup, screen shots of WYSIWYG editing-views) demonstrate accessible authoring practices that meet the WCAG 2.0 success criteria. (Level A to meet WCAG 2.0 Level A success criteria; Level AA to meet WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA success criteria; Level AAA to meet all WCAG 2.0 success criteria)

DEFINITION:
"Range": More than one item within a multi-item set. 
(Informative) Note: ATAG 2.0 uses the term "range" in several success criteria in which absolute measurements may not always be practical (e.g. the set of all help documentation examples, the set of all templates, etc.). While the strict testable requirement is the definition "More than one item within a multi-item set", implementers are strongly encouraged to implement the success criteria more broadly.

Intent of Success Criterion B.4.2.1:
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The intent of this success criterion is to have accessible authoring practices introduced to authors as naturally integrated common practice. The success criterion is also intended to reduce the chance that authors will copy inaccessible authoring practices from examples in the documentation. Essentially, modelling inaccessible authoring practices in the documentation should be viewed in the same way as modelling invalid markup or spelling/grammar errors.

WCAG 2.0 is referenced because it provides testable success criteria to measure web content accessibility.

Examples of Success Criterion B.4.2.1:
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- Reference examples are accessible: An HTML authoring tool includes an on-line HTML markup reference guide. Markup examples within the reference guide are all valid code and they all meet the WCAG 2.0 Level A success criteria.

- Screen shots show accessibility features in use: A content management system has a help system that includes screen shots of various aspects of the system's user interface. When screen shots show examples of the user interfaces as content is being produced, the user interface is always shown such that the content produced would meet the WCAG 2.0 Level A success criteria (e.g. prompts filled in, optional accessibility features turned on, etc.).



-- 
(Mr) Jan Richards, M.Sc.
jrichards@ocad.ca | 416-977-6000 ext. 3957 | fax: 416-977-9844
Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) | http://idrc.ocad.ca/
Faculty of Design | OCAD University

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 17:02:39 UTC