RE: Moving Conformance Claim

Would it be possible to use the same format that
P3P uses to accomplish this issue?

Lee
  -----Original Message-----
  From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org
[mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
Gregg Vanderheiden
  Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 10:36 AM
  To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
  Subject: Moving Conformance Claim
  Importance: High


  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
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<http://trace.wisc.edu/>
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