Re: User agent capabilities [was Agenda

Actually, I think that it is a much lower priority work item for us to create
profiles of WCAG for different constraints provided by certain organisations.
It seems to me much more the job of whoever is placing the constraints to
demonstrate tht for their purposes a particular requirement of universal
accessibility is not relevant.

For example, we could in principle assume that everyone in the world uses
iCab (the japanese version) with the speech and keyboard control systems
native to the Macintosh, and work out what are the requirements that we can
ignore, or can list the problems that occur, based on that. Essentially I
think we have a critical requirement to make one such decision: What is the
baseline requirements for a User Agent?

Beyond this, we should be able to name the problems that each checkpoint
addresses. But there are limits to how far we can track each tool set and
which checkpoints are relevant to it.

(For me this is in the same basket as setting policy. i.e. it belongs to the
people who are doing it.)

Charles.

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:

  Another user agent issue I face is that it depends on the user group.

  For example, if a business or agency provides its employess with user
  agents having certain capabilities, it doesn't have to worry about older
  user agents, for pages only used by those employees.   In other words, we
  can assume more for intranet pages than for internet pages.  (I'm dealing
  with this as we speak BTW).

  I think this is yet another argument for having a document (or section of a
  document) that deals only with accessibility as a function of user agent,
  and omits "requirements" or "compliance".

  Requirements for compliance should be in a different document (or document
  section), which takes into account the user population (e.g. public vs.
  employee) and factors against which there may be a tradeoff with
  accessibility (e.g. "essential purpose" ).

  I think this will save time in the long run, since we'll otherwise have
  perpetual arguments due to different people having different situations in
  mind.

  Len
  --
  Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
  Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple
  University
  (215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
  http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

  Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

  The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant:
  http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000:
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Received on Thursday, 7 December 2000 15:36:34 UTC