Moving Conformance Claim

Ian has suggested that it was inappropriate to have conformance claims
or claims that someone had done anything in particular as being success
criteria under our checkpoints.  His comment was that it doesn't
technically make the page more accessible to document your claim
(although documenting your claim might cause one to make it more
accessible).

 

The group discussed this on last Thursday and came to the conclusion
that Ian was mostly correct.  However, one of the points that was made
earlier was that if the accessibility were documented in a easily
searchable fashion, it could make the pages more accessible by allowing
individuals who have disabilities to easily find shopping or content
site, etc. which they would be able to use.

 

In order for this to work however, it would be necessary that pages not
only document their accessibility, but do so in a fashion which was
easily machine readable.  This in turn would seem to imply that there
was a standard mechanism in place for doing so and that search tools
were available that could work with this standard mechanism.

 

In the end, we decided to remove any "documentation of accessibility" as
specific success criteria under items, at least at the level one or
level two.  It was felt that specific documentation of the individual
guidelines would be useful at level three, but again only if there was a
standard mechanism for doing so.  One suggestion was that it included at
level three and that we watch to see if a standard mechanism came into
being before the guidelines were completed.  If not, then it would be
dropped.

 

EARL was brought up as the logical approach.  However, note that EARL is
like XML in that it is a method for writing conformance statements.  It
does not necessarily specify exactly how to write-up the conformance
statement so that it would be uniform across sites and therefore
searchable.

 

Also note that the statement may have to be on every single page in
order for a search engine to be able to evaluate it based upon a "hit"
on a page.  The inclusion, however, might be able to be indirect.

 

This item is posted to the list for discussion and ideas and to give us
all a chance to more thoroughly think it through.

 

Thanks Ian for catching the initial issue.

 

 

Gregg

 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 
Professor - Human Factors 
Depts of Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.
Director - Trace R & D Center 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 
Gv@trace.wisc.edu < <mailto:Gv@trace.wisc.edu>
mailto:Gv@trace.wisc.edu>, < <http://trace.wisc.edu/>
http://trace.wisc.edu/> 
FAX 608/262-8848  
For a list of our listserves send "lists" to listproc@trace.wisc.edu <
<mailto:listproc@trace.wisc.edu> mailto:listproc@trace.wisc.edu>