Standards Harmonisation

Hello Judy/All,

I have sent a few copy-edit suggestions to EO-Editors, but include some
suggestions for new material and restructure here:

1. Organisations:

Suggest an additional para (to become para 2) talking about minimum levels
of accessibility aimed for by multi-region/multi-jurisdiction organisations
because they face different and/or conflicting standards, rather than
aiming for a higher level of accessibility that would be practical if they
only faced one standard.

2. Browsers etc

2.1 Suggest an additional paragraph along the lines of:
"adopting structural markup and W3C (technical) standards will
drive/encourage assistive technology developers to reveal more semantic
information to users of these technologies"
- currently this section has Assistive Technology in the heading, but not
in the text.

2.2 Can we expand the "Browsers etc" section to include Evaluation Tools?
If so, then I suggest moving the first para and the three dot points for
"Fragmentation" to the end of the "Browsers etc" section.

3. Fragmentation

3.1 If we adopted my suggestion 2.2 (above), then the remaining material is
really about myths - suggest a changed heading to "Myths Regarding
Harmonisation"

3.2 Suggestion for the last para that starts "For organizations that have
already developed ..." along the lines of:

Governments and organisations that have already developed their own
accessibility guidelines should:
# consider becoming involved in one of the WAI working groups to ensure
that their needs are heard within W3C
# monitor the development of future versions of the W3C accessibility
guidelines and actively comment on the public drafts
# redirect their localisation energies into ensuring adoption of
international standards by authoring and evaluation tool developers ( and
getting local translations of these tools?), and website developers and
publishers
# look to becoming involved in W3C's authorised translation program
# develop a process for updating local policies and standards to harmonise
with the next releases of the W3C international accessibility guidelines

4. Action Steps

4.1 Paragraph one talks about WCAG 2.0 - what about mentioning ATAG 2.0?

4.2 Suggest an extra dot point along the lines of
"more demand on user agents (and assistive technologies?) to reveal and
provide access to the semantic and accessibility aspects of web pages"

4.3 What about a dot point about translations?

Regards, Andrew


_________________________________
Dr Andrew Arch
Manager Online Accessibility Consulting
National Information & Library Service, Australia
Ph 613 9864 9222; Fax 613 9864 9210; Mobile 0438 755 565
http://www.nils.org.au/ | http://www.it-test.com.au/ |
http://www.ozewai.org/

Member, Education & Outreach Working Group,
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/

NILS - A Joint Venture between the
Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind, The Royal Blind Society of NSW,
and Vision Australia Foundation.

Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 23:50:22 UTC