24 Sept Techniques Task Force telecon Summary

Attending: Sailesh Panchang, Tom Croucher, David MacDonald, Chris Ridpath, 
Wendy Chisholm
Regrets: Michael Cooper, Ben Caldwell

The Techniques Task Force has been discussing personae and use cases for 
the last few weeks in an effort to answer the following questions in order 
to create an informed design:
1.  Who is the primary audience for Gateway to Techniques?  for 
technology-specific techniques?
2. How will they use it?
3. What are their needs?
4. What is the best way to lead people from Checkpoints and Success 
Criteria to non-technology specific techniques to technology-specific 
techniques?
5. We will end up with a lot of information, how will people find what they 
are looking for?

Since Ben and Michael both sent regrets, the focus of this discussion was 
user scenarios and personae.  David created a cast of personae based on 
interviews with people from a variety of backgrounds (a person who writes 
contracts, a person who develops policy, etc.).  He will do some more 
research on a few of them and send notes to the list.  The feedback about 
WCAG 1.0 is very useful and some of the needs they expressed should be kept 
in mind for WCAG 2.0.

Tom then discussed thoughts about use cases Sailesh had sent to Tom.

This lead into a discussion about cultural differences and how to take 
those into account while developing WCAG 2.0.  In particular, are the terms 
we are using in WCAG 2.0 easy to translate? "Transform gracefully" from 
WCAG 1.0 was difficult for some of the translators.  What about countries 
or languages where information about Web accessibility has not been 
translated into their language and they rely on English versions?  What 
about concepts that are difficult to translated? Is there anything in WCAG 
2.0 that might be offensive?  Especially in techniques where we have 
examples, what process will we use to translate the techniques documents?

Sailesh informed us about India, Tom spoke about Europe, and we discussed 
the need to develop better contacts in Asia and Africa.  Wendy provided an 
update about the effort to develop contacts in Japan and China. We are 
attempting to hold a WCAG WG meeting in November in Tokyo to  as well as 
setting up a variety of meetings with people to increase the dialogue about 
WCAG 2.0 and Japanese-specific concerns.  Judy Brewer and other WAI staff 
are heading to Beijing this fall to further dialogue in that region.

This lead to discussion of the W3C Glossary project, the WAI Glossary, and 
the WCAG 2.0 Glossary.  One goal of the Glossary projects is to create a 
list of terms that will be one of the first documents translated.  This 
should help people who have some knowledge of English, but would like to 
look up particular phrases in a glossary that has been translated into 
their primary language.  It will also give us an opportunity to look at 
translation difficulty before sending WCAG 2.0 through the Recommendation 
track.  This discussion highlighted the need to increase the priority on 
the glossary work.

There is a public mailing list for the W3C glossary work: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-glossary/
An announcement on 19 Sept [1] provides a look at the first phase of the 
Glossary work: a searchable database of terms used in W3C specifications.

We resolved that these are all issues for the larger group to discuss and 
are looking for an opportunity to get them on a Thursday call.

Best,
--wendy

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-glossary/2003Sep/0000.html

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

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2003 15:23:25 UTC