20 Feb 2003 - WCAG WG Teleconference Minutes

Available at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2003/02/20-minutes.html
Please send corrections, omissions, and suggestions.
Best,
--wendy

Summary

Ian Jacobs summarized:

1. How did UAAG 1.0 solve the problem of conformance flexibility?

       A very simplified answer is by modularizing the document and
       dividing the requirements along several axes. Developers can
       claim conformance using these different axes.

2. How did UAAG 1.0 solve the problem of subjective requirements?

       By dividing general requirements into smaller, more precise
       requirements.

There were several questions about how much leeway developers were given 
and how easy it is for a developer to ignore major parts of the specification.

One of the axes that people found most interesting is "applicability." Ian 
explained that there are cases where UAAG requirements don't apply. Thus, a 
developer can say "we think the following checkpoints don't apply..." To 
diminish abuse, we narrowed it down to 3 scenarios where someone could use 
the applicability label. e.g., no tables in svg, thus svg viewer could 
claim those checkpoints are not applicable. There was interest in seeing 
how this might apply to WCAG but it wasn't clear how to apply it without 
inadvertently dividing some of the checkpoints by disability or ensuring 
that the clause couldn't be abused. There was also concern about making 
conformance too complex.

We raised lots of questions about scope of claims and discussed the 
benefits of machine-readable claims.

The discussion questions for this call were:

     1. What can we learn from UAAG 1.0 and the UAWG's experience?
     2. How can WCAG 2.0 reference UAAG 1.0?
     3. What user agent features does WCAG 2.0 assume are implemented?

While we didn't resolve these completely, here is some headway:

1. We learned about the flexibility of UAAG 1.0 conformance claims and 
began to consider how we might make use of this flexibility in WCAG 2.0. 
Wendy took an action item to play with the UAAG conformance model to see 
how it might apply to WCAG.

2. We learned that to reference UAAG 1.0 we need to come up with a 
conformance profile based on the various axes and labels. Wendy took an 
action to work on this with Ian.

3. By creating a conformance profile and thinking about an example 
baseline, we will have a better sense of the assumptions we are making 
regarding support of user agent features. This has been discussed in the 
Techniques Task Force (ala [techs] messages to the mailing list and 
telecons on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. EST).

-- 
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
/--

Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2003 21:11:25 UTC