the discussion on how to measure conformance

Hi,

We have touched on the discussion on what to  do if a website is 99 % double A compliant. Does this mean that you can only give your site an A, or can you give id a double A, and if so can you also give a double A to a site that is 90 percent double A compliant, in other words if double a is not 100 percent compliant how to draw the line. These questions cannot be answered if we want to give up the position that double a or trippele a is exactly what the requirements state. But there may be another way to work with this problem. This way could be to ask the simple question who needs the logos for the conformance level for a site, the site owner or the disabled users visiting the site. For me The answer here depends on weather I    can use a site that is read the information, use the navigation and find and retreive data and interact if this is possible, I do not care a bit about the conformance level of the site if I can perform these actions. If however I cannot or only if tasks take unreasonable long time or require that I use my knowledge of either the way my ua works or that I look at the way the site is coded or even must resort to have sighted persons look at the page to be able to work with it, it is clear that I face problems and that I wish something should be done to increase the useability on the site. Here I asume that the problems I face are not based on general poor usability but are caused by the fact that I use a special UA with speech and braille output instead of using the screen. 

Currently if site owners take the route of requiring a WAI conformance level they have to put in a certain amount of work to meet the standard. They can then put the logo on their site. There is not however any requirement that they should document features on the site that has been made or changed in order to meet the conformance requirements. I think that a requirement to have all sites wanting to conform to any of the livels give a description on what has been done to secure accessability could be a very good thing. One feature that needs to be described if you could find a describtion fast is the use of accesskeys. Obviously a site you use often that uses accesskeys you will get used to, but new sites that may have enabled other keys than was used on the last site you have visited where accesskeys were used, will make it too hard to take advantage of this particular feature. 
In short a discription could secure several tings, that a person looking for this information e.g. a blind hoping to find a list of the access keys that is used on the sites,  could search for a link with a standard text, and the same is true for all others who know from past experience that it makes sence for this particular user to spend time going through this specialized help. Another nice outcome of this requirement is that it will force the site developers  to think about what they are doing, and maybe even try to include disabled users in early beta tests. This requirement to have disabled person test the site is actually an important part of the Danish guidelines, for exactly the reason that an automated test like Bobby or a conformance level such a the WAI logos, can only get a site part of the way to beeing accessable, because it also depends on the users using the site, and here we are back to another part of the discussion currently going on here on the list.

Claus

Received on Sunday, 22 October 2000 13:08:13 UTC