RE: Conformance Ideas -- Collection #1

Human-readable conformance claims could be used by people, like users
and regulating agencies.  These claims would be in English (or French,
or Spanish, or whatever).  I expect that the user experience would be
similar to the privacy policy you see on a lot of Web sites.  

Machine-readable conformance claims could be used by programs, like
browsers and search engines, to help users find content that works for
them, and filter (hide) content that doesn't.  These claims would be in
XML, probably EARL, but maybe other XML languages too.  The users would
never look at them, just like users don't look at Style Sheets.

If we have the machine-readable claims, then we can write text that
matches up each claim in the XML and use XSL/T to put the pieces of text
together into a human-readable claim automatically.  We can do this for
as many human languages as we want.  The task of writing English
conformance claims is easier if we do the XML ones first.

-----Original Message-----
From: Anne Pemberton [mailto:apembert@erols.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 3:41 PM
To: GLWAI Guidelines WG (GL - WAI Guidelines WG)
Subject: Re: Conformance Ideas -- Collection #1


Jim,

         So, if not the user, then who is the audience of the
"conformance 
data"?  the regulating agencies?

                                                 Anne

At 11:16 AM 10/9/01 +0000, Jim Ley wrote:
> >          I'm still unclear who the audience is for the conformance
>claims.
> > If the user has to go to the page (which may be inaccessible to
>him/her),
> > and has to find a logo and click on it to find out which checkpoints
>were
> > skipped so he/she can't use the page, is this of any help to the 
> > user?
>
>I would imagine that a user would use a User Agent, which could at the 
>very least allow them to query the links within the current page for 
>which are accessible to various categories.  This means that if they 
>are on an accessible page to them, then they'll know which links, they 
>can visit.  This is simply implementable on top of IE5 for example, so 
>UAs based on that aswell as any future UAs can have this easily.
>
>This would mean that existing search engines, as long as they are 
>accessible can be used, and the results filtered against the 
>accessibility requirements, wholly clientside which would mean no need 
>for any modification of the search engines, which is perhaps 
>unrealistic to expect for some time.
>
> >          Which search engines are capable of reading metadata and
>conveying
> > the information to the user?
>
>I know of none, certainly none which have indexed a sufficient amount 
>to be useful.
>
> >          Consider a user who needs illustration to understand text? 
> > How will the conformance claims help such a user locate a bank, for
>instance,
> > that uses illustrations in to guide user through the desired banking
>steps?
>
>I believe the only practical solution would be to search for all banks,

>and then filter these against the appropriate conditions.
>
>Jim.

Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 20:09:14 UTC