Re: Questions regarding compliance and alternative pages

"Leonard R. Kasday" wrote:
> 
> The following questions regarding compliance came up in today's ER meeting:
> 
> A. Compliance with alternative pages:
> 
> The guideline states
> 
> 11.4 If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide
> a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible,
> has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as
> the inaccessible (original) page. [Priority 1]
> 
> If this is done, can the inaccessible page be given a compliance logo
> corresponding to the conformance of the alternative page?

Yes. The conformance claim should indicate the scope of the claim,
in this case a combination of two pages.

(For background, refer to
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wai-pr-issues#conformance-alt-pages)
 
> B. Links between alternative pages and standard pages.
> 
> Question: once you are on an alternative page, should links on that page
> refer back to the "standard" page or should there be a complete and self
> contained parallel site.  There are arguments on either side.  Some users
> prefer to stay on the standard site as much as possible.  On the other
> hand, it can be tedious to have to keep switching to the alternate page.

My opinion is that, since alternative pages should be used as little
as possible, you should avoid where possible creating an 
alternative site. However, it would make sense that if you have a 
particular type of page that appears frequently and is always 
inaccessible alone, you could/should promote easy navigation within that 
set of pages.
 
> C: Regarding Compliance Scope.
> 
> The guidelines state:
> 
> Form 2: Include, on each page claiming conformance, one of three icons
> provided by W3C and link the icon to the appropriate W3C explanation of the
> claim. Information about the icons and how to insert them in pages is
> available at [WCAG-ICONS].

Please note that the conformance statements in ATAG and UAAG are more
general and we're slowly improving conformance provisions since WCAG 1.0
was published. Check out, for instance, the UAAG Proposed Rec
conformance
section:

     http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/PR-UAAG10-20000310/#Conformance

There's still work to be done to show how to use metadata to
describe scope, etc.
 
> Questions:
> 
> 1. Is this icon allowed even if the pages itself is accessible but links to
> inaccessible pages?

Yes, but the link should be clearly identified. I would argue that
the icon should not be used if the inaccessible page does not link
directly to the accessible page.

> 2. It would be useful to define claims that go beyond the scope of the
> current page.  We discussed the possibility WCAG defining one or more types
> of scope, e.g. "everything with a URL given by a given domain
> name".   [note added by LRK after the meeting: this wouldn't cover sites
> which have pages that refer to IP addresses.  Perhaps we should leave it up
> to page or site authors to define the scope... we'd just require that some
> means of defining the scope be defined.]

Yes. And that's where we need to spend more time working on the
metadata (schema?) to use in conformance claims. 

 - Ian

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 429-8586
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2000 09:40:39 UTC