Re: User agent capabilities [was Agenda

Charles,

Let me check if I understand what you mean with an example.

Take LONGDESC for example.

and consider a WCAG that
1. omitted LONGDESC from the baseline requirement
2. said "to accommodate users with user agents that support LONGDESC it is 
sufficient to use that that attribute to give a more detailed description"
3. also said  "to accommodate users with agents that don't support 
LONGDESC, use a "D link" as follows etc..."

Now, for purposes of discussion, please put aside for now whether we 
actually want to omit LONGDESC from the baseline, and also please also put 
aside whether the rest of this example is worded optimally or complete.

I want to ask just this narrower question: is this the type of Guideline 
document you are advocating?

Len

p.s.

I'd personally support that sort of document.  Then the only issue will be 
whether WAI will want to say anything anywhere about what sets of user 
agent capabilities might be assumed and how the guidelines filter thru 
those assumptions.


At 03:36 PM 12/7/00 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>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/

Received on Friday, 8 December 2000 09:10:00 UTC