Re: Conformance Claims

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doyle Burnett" <dburnett@sesa.org>
To: "W3C Web Content" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 11:39 PM
Subject: Conformance Claims


>
> To The Group -
>
> I cannot recall who it was that posted a message a few weeks ago about
> conformance claims and the fact that site developers are claiming to
have
> met some level of WCAG 1.0 when in fact they fall short.

It was me :)

> My concern is that
> many site developers will boast the claim but NOT actually meet the
> guidelines.  A bigger issue is - why do they think they passed in the
first
> place?  Many of the sites I've looked at could not have tested with a
tool
> as they had no declared DOC TYPE and the pages would not parse.  So -
I
> assume they did some sort of manual check and assumed they met
criteria.
>
> As we work on WCAG 2.0, I am guessing that there will be many
individuals
> (well intentioned individuals) who will claim they have met
conformance
> levels but have not.  Is this an education and outreach issue or one
we need
> to talk about in terms of content?  If web developers think they are
doing
> "it" right and they are not (in terms of adherence to the
guidelines) -
> something is possibly missing (on our part).  Or, possibly, something
was
> "simply" overlooked when the site was checked for conformance.
>
> I am not sure there is an answer to these questions or concerns but
have
> been paying attention to those sites that claim to meet WCAG 1.0 and
have
> done machine and manual tests to determine the validity of the claims.

For personal experience (I represent inside W3C IWA/HWG, the world
biggest association of web professional), web develpers that don't work
directly in accessibility initiatives, for reach the "minimum level of
accessibility" only made the "Bobby" or other automatic testing tool
validation.
This is wrong also because these tools are not the "panacea" for the
validation: for eg. a lot of these don't validate CSS so there is the pr
oblem that if I use fixed size font the validator said me "xxxx approved
for level AA" but if the font are fixed size i cannot declare level 2.
The best to do is to create a policy maker (like this one:
http://www.prato.linux.it/~gbartolini/it/wcag/) where the developer in
good faith declare what points its work reached.

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2003 03:02:46 UTC