Re: Draft of EARL abstract intended for DIWG

At 04:33 PM 6/29/01 -0400, Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
>Are you thinking that it would be used in conjunction with CC/PP to 
>describe conformance preferences?  e.g., in CC/PP state that I only want 
>content that meets WCAG Level A?  Help?

What I am thinking (or what I think I *was* thinking) is that EARL permits 
authors (actually anyone, not just authors) to make assertions about 
anything. That's pretty general and also seems counter-intuitive else why 
didn't we have this years ago, etc.

One of the classes of assertions could be about one's 
document/process/condition/+ so that the user's CC/PP could be matched 
against the EARL assertions and choices made about what to send up the 
line. I guess it's part of a tool suite for content negotiation. Now when I 
start using all those acronyms and buzzphrases I am open to embarrassment 
because I don't really have a clue as to what all that means, but judging 
by the reactions of people who do know, I'm not far off base.

If you examine the "requirements" document it contains a whole lot of stuff 
that could be the basis for claims made by someone seeking to aver device 
independence: "You can get your (stock quotes)/(train schedule)/(weather 
report)/(reservations & tickets) on your cell phone because I have made my 
site fulfill the DIWG requirement list. Your CC/PP indicates that you can 
handle this." Or "the display you use can be used to its limit because I 
have optimized the style sheet for your hi-res, giant screen system" - etc.

Ultimately EARL assertions will be part of the authoring process and will 
be tied to a report that "indexes" the content via RDF. According to my 
reading of the people who know something about this, it should be Real Soon 
Now. The idea that Google could have an accessibility rating right along 
with their usual "you may want to download a text version of this if you 
think PDF sucks" and "you might want this to be translated on the fly if 
you can't read Swahili", both of which they already do.

Imagine a Web on which sites are tagged as "508 compliant" or "WAI 
conformance AA"! The glue for this is that if someone claims (via EARL 
assertion) to be AA compliant, there will be independent sources for other 
EARL assertions that dispute it when appropriate. And Google can handle all 
this in microseconds.

It's a Web - not a tree.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Friday, 29 June 2001 19:02:25 UTC