FW: Moving Conformance Claim

  please note;
  The rdf techniques draft so far, have the ability to link each accessible
annotation to WCAG checkpoint
  If this group requests it I volunteer to increase the vocabulary to
general conformance claims.
  As before, I can include the mechanism and an example into the draft, and
we can discuses it from there

  Let me know

  All the best,
  Lisa Seeman

  UnBounded Access

  Widen the World Web

  http://www.UBaccess.com



    -----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 8:36 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
    Gv@trace.wisc.edu <mailto:Gv@trace.wisc.edu>, <http://trace.wisc.edu/>
    FAX 608/262-8848
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