RE: Checkpoint on testability

At 01:50 PM 12/22/00 -0800, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>miss whole areas of "accessibility" which aren't machine testable

Hence my remark: "...being able to determine if a site will work for your 
circumstances."

Being "testable" has nothing to do with whether the testing must be 
"automatable". I want to know if the author has asserted conformance to 
such things as "reading level appropriate to audience" and "use of 
multimedia to enhance presentations", etc. We are on the same train here. 
Inclusion of testability is a way to enable a teacher to determine if the 
site has a means to determine if it follows any particular guideline that's 
of interest to the potential user.

The question is if this "meta-accessibility" is appropriately called for in 
the guidelines. Kynn is on the side of "it would be nice but wouldn't 
increase accessibility" and I'm on the side that "if you can't get at it to 
test (this includes subjective tests claimed to be made by the author), 
then it suffers in the accessibility department. In other words, in 
addition to having appropriate illustrations it must be able to allow you 
to find out that it claims (or has) such illustrations. It matters, even 
(or especially) for conforming sites to assert their conformance as well as 
provide a way to test the assertions thereto.

The confusion engendered by the apparent elaborate insertions called for is 
that they will be a trivial exercise for the author - just a checkbox 
saying "I have included illustrations" or "this material has been 
determined to be useful for those reading at a first grade level" or 
whatever. The underlying machine-readable gobbledygook won't get your 
attention any more than the header associated with your email like your 
last one:
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Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 13:50:24 -0800
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From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
Subject: RE: Checkpoint on testability
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You didn't have to write any of that but it's all there for machines to 
deal with and allow me to post this answer!

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE