Re: EOWG: Reviewing ATAG

Friends,

I hope that you are all having a wonderful end of 2006.  Last night I sat down with the latest working draft of ATAG 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/) and a big cup of coffee. 

* My general high level thoughts...

When reading it, I was looking for what could I potentially take to a group of web application developers who were going to write a CMS or blogging tool (which are by definition authoring tools.)  

After reading about 20 pages, the gist seemed to be if the authoring tool is web-based then the user interface should be WCAG-compliant and the content that is produced should be WCAG-compliant.  Those two things would get you 90% of the way to where you should be. 

Is that an accurate take away?  

If I was a cms developer and just reading it with fresh eyes, I don't know if I would be able to boil it down that easily.  

* Section 1.2 Role of Authoring Tools in Web Accessibility
Other then the first full paragraph, I am not sure what any of it has to do with the role of authoring tools in web accessibility.  It is all good material.  It just doesn't seem to fit.  I would expect that this section would be like the authoring tool portion of the components of web accessibility document.

*  Section 1.3 Relationship to WCAG
Is the need to refer to both versions of WCAG because ATAG 2.0 might come out before WCAG 2.0?  Not being version specific seems like it would add another level of complexity to an already complex document.

The idea of content type-specific WCAG benchmark document (a mouthful to say) is introduced.  How is this different from a techniques document?

* Section 2.1 Conformance Model
In the checkpoint priorities section it refers to Significance in Part A and Part B.  I'm assuming this is referring to how the guidelines are split into Part A. Vs. Part B.  The concept that the guidelines are split into Part A and Part B hasn't been touched on yet, except for in the table of contents.  For someone reading the document from beginning to end, they might be confused.

In priority 2 the word difficult is used to describe the experience of using an authoring tool.  In priority 3 the word inefficient is used.  Is there that much of a semantic difference between the two for people to right off understand the difference?  Can something be inefficient to use and difficult?

* Section 2.2 Conformance Claim
Could we get an example of what some different conformance claims looked like?

The fourth point asks for a description of how the normative success criteria were met for each of the checkpoints that were required.  Just seems like that is a lot to ask for.  I could see an authoring tool developer thinking, "I just made my app atag compliant and now I have to write an essay on how I did it?"

There is a whole page worth of material on Content Type-Specific WCAG Benchmarks.  The whole concept furrows my brow.  Regardless, could this whole section be put into a separate document and just a link be made to it?  It doesn't seem to be an ATAG specific concept.

* The Guidelines - Part A
Checkpoint A.1.4 (http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/#check-tool-sep-display-prefs)  doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.  If I'm going to know how I should fix a problem, I need to more so understand what the problem is.

Checkpoint A.1.5 (http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/#check-tool-sep-presentation) the success criteria uses the idea "semantic description of the presentation."  I'm not really sure what the means.

This is about as far as I got for now.  Hopefully able to get through the rest of it tonight.

Cheers,
Justin




******************
Justin Thorp
US Library of Congress
Web Services - Office of Strategic Initiatives
e - juth@loc.gov
p - 202/707-9541

>>> Shawn Henry <shawn@w3.org> 12/21/06 4:05 PM >>>

EOWG,

A Working Draft of ATAG is available for review. Note that this is likely the last draft before a second Last Call Working Draft, and therefore now is an important time to submit comments.

We will discuss ATAG comments at our next EOWG teleconference on Friday 5 January 2007. Here are links to facilitate your review:
* Call for Review e-mail: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2006OctDec/0292.html 
* ATAG Overview: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php 
* ATAG Working Draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/ 

Specifically, EOWG should focus on:
- Is the ATAG 2.0 Working Draft understandable? Please consider the Abstract, Status, Introduction, and Conformance sections separately.
- Are the guidelines and success criteria clear?

Please send initial comments, issues, or questions to the EOWG mailing list anytime in the next 2 weeks.

Regards,
~Shawn & Judy

Received on Thursday, 28 December 2006 15:54:40 UTC