RE: Please review latest requirements draft before Wednesday, 22 January

Yes -   One of the confusions that remains in the technology requirements
doc is whether Technology Specific Checklists needed to meet all the Success
Criteria for all Checkpoints.  Thanks for catching it.  We need to clean
that up.  

We had one discussion on it.  The result of that discussion was that Yes
they did.  Otherwise people could think they met the guidelines because they
met all the items on the checklist for their technology, when in fact the
checklist did not cover all the necessary requirements in the guidelines.

Also, you can imagine checklists for technologies that would just leave
items off because there was no way to meet that requirement with that
technology.    When in fact if level one items can't be met with the
technology, then it should be clear from the checklist that the content
would need to be provided in another accessible form as well.

CSS, JPGs, GIFs are all examples of technologies that are not presentation
technologies in themselves, but components of an HTML page (or other
technologies).  Actually, a CSS sheet shouldn't contain any information. 

JPEGs for example don't have any checkpoints for the technology itself but
presenting a page as a big JPEG would definitely not meet the guidelines.

Gregg

 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 
Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.
Director - Trace R & D Center 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Jason White
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 2:30 AM
To: Andi Snow-Weaver
Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: Please review latest requirements draft before Wednesday, 22
January


Andi Snow-Weaver writes:
 > 
 > There is definitely something confusing about the description of
 > "Technology-specific Checklists" in section 5. It states that the
checklist
 > "must include technology-specific checklist items that address every
 > success criterion in the guidelines." But Section 3.2 states that "for a
 > given technology, it is not necessary to provide Techniques for every
 > checkpoint if the checkpoint is not applicable to the technology and the
 > technology is designed to be used with another technology."
 > 
 > I read 3.2 to mean that not every checkpoint will apply to every
 > technology. If the checkpoint doesn't apply, then neither do the the
 > success criteria for that checkpoint. So then how can we require, in
 > Section 5, that there must be technology-specific checklist items for
every
 > success criterion in the guidelines?

Here are a few suggestions. First, it may be recalled that we plan to
write "core techniques" covering those success criteria of which the
implementation is not dependent on the features of any specific
technology. In each checklist, we could combine checklist items from
the core techniques with technology-specific checklist items so that
the entire set of guidelines is covered in the resulting checklist.

If we decide to set an absolute requirement that every checklist must
cover every checkpoint in the guidelines, then this would be
tantamount to a decision that "dependent" technologies such as CSS,
which are intended to be used in conjunction with other formats, could
not have their own checklists. For example, there could be an (X)HTML +
CSS + DOM/Ecmascript checklist but neither a CSS nor a DOM/Ecmascript
checklist alone. I think there is still an unresolved question as to
whether that is the result we want. For the purpose of developing the
Techniques schema we don't have to resolve these issues, so work on
the standard format for techniques can proceed apace even if the finer
details regarding checklists haven't been completely worked out. The
most important point, I would argue, with this draft of the
requirements document is that we agree on what should be included in
the techniques and the rough details of the output formats we plan to
support.

Tomorrow's meeting will, however, provide an opportunity to elucidate
these issues and to arrive at a disposition concerning the
requirements document. We can of course attempt to resolve these
issues at the meeting, but if further work is needed then the working
group may decide to proceed with publication of the requirements after
inserting an appropriate editorial comment at a suitable point in the
document.

I think the most important point is to ensure that we have a solid
basis on which to develop the schema for techniques, and that some of
the issues
concerning the output formats can be safely postponed as long as they
don't affect the source XML format currently under development.

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 13:20:19 UTC