Re: FWD: Common interface for automatic evaluation tools

This would be a neat trick for developers working in Java - you would be able
to ship around code. But that might not be relevant to commercial develpments
where people are using other languages...

An interesting part of this would be looking at using Web Services -
since you ship the document and get a result back you don't really care if
the code is compatible with your platform or not because you're not running
it locallly.

Another possibility would be to provide a semantically rich code description
for testing functions - inputs, outputs, code language (some good stuff can
be done in sed, other stuff might be avialable in Java, ...), whether repair
code is available, etc.

This would be something like the Testing Description Language that was
discussed at the EARL workshop in June 2002 for which there were no available
resources.

The reason I currently prefer EARL as a general transport is that it is
simpler. You only have to agree on the test suite being used (in
accessibility that can be pretty easily done by using external tests and a
way of namingor pointing to things (which can be done using URIs and Xpath
for XML content, although there isn't much that is easy otherwise -
line/character offset hhas the problem that different tools format code
differently, breaking all these (very brittle) references. If you want to
agree on shipping test code you need a lot more tight ompatibility design.

It is possible to write tests for LIFT for Dreamweaver (in Javascript),
AccVerify (through the interface) or WAINu (as Java code). Making them
portable is a major hassle. It would be nice if it happened, but seems in
general to be "too hard" - there are too many reasons why it won't work, and
finding a way around it by integrating results from different tools seems
much more achieveable.

just my 2 cents

Cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Shadi Abou-Zahra wrote:

>
>hi,
>
>wanted to bring up an interesting idea proposed by alan to the group:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Alan Chuter [mailto:achuter@teleservicios.com]
>> Subject: Common interface for automatic evaluation tools
>>
>> I've been in contact with two Java-based evaluation tools
>> last week. Although EARL allows the integration of reports
>> from different tools, a very simple idea occurred to me to
>> allow pluggable tests. My suggestion is to establish a set of
>> common interfaces for tests and for pages. Each tool should
>> define a method that accepts a AccessibilityTest object. The
>> test object fulfils the, for example, AccessibilityTest
>> interface which defines one method:
>>
>> TestResult runTest(WebDocument doc);
>>
>> Each tool would provide a method to register
>> AccessibilityTest objects, and then run all the registered
>> tests against each WebDocument it creates. The
>> AccessibilityTest objects all return TestResults.
>>
>> While EARL allows a comparison of results for different
>> checkpoints across different tools, this technique would
>> allow the same test code to be run on each tool. It allows
>> users to create their own pluggable tests, and potentially
>> allows a test developer to produce a test suite independantly
>> of the tool vendor.
>>
>> I hope I'm not repeating something that's been discussed already.
>>
>> regards
>>
>> Alan Chuter.
>> Accessibility Consultant.
>> Fundosa Teleservicios, SA
>> Fundación ONCE.
>> Tel:+34 91 121 03 35
>> achuter@teleservicios.com
>

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22
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Received on Monday, 8 September 2003 22:17:11 UTC