Fw: Re: Paragraph on rational for abandoning the "Priority"....

We've been discussing this issue in the SIDAR's
WCAG2-ESPA group. We think the idea of priorities must not be abandoned. An explanation of what WCAG2-ESPA group is can be found at the end of this message.

David's email is quoted and discussed.

> The reason for this is that each success criteria,
regardless of priority 
> category that it would fall into, could make the
critical difference between
>accessibility and inaccessibility for some group of
users. 

That's true, but the absence of clear rules that give developers and content producers a path to follow can be even more dangerous. A fuzzy classification of the guidelines will lead to unwanted situations where people without a proper background, willing to produce accessible content, will not be able to reach an acceptable result applying the guidelines of their choice.

>Given this, it is impossible
> to make some checkpoints more important than others
without implying that
> some users are more important than others.

Well, maybe the guidelines could be qualified identifying the group of people for which each guideline is important. There are guidelines that are possitively important for all groups of people. There are guidelines that if not followed, possitively avoid the access to content to a certain groups of users. And inside each group of users it woudln't seem rejectable to make priorities, would it? Maybe different profiles of WAI conformace could be built.

A more complex idea, maybe for a later phase of discussion. With these 3 dimensions in mind:

1)Degree of inaccessibility created by non-conformance
2)Group of users
3)Guidelines


a map can be drawn to locate guidelines that affect every/some groups and guidelines that avoid absolutely access to content for some groups. Priorities of the different guidelines should become clear to the working group and a "quick priority roadmap path for applying the guidelines" could be given to content producers.

Content producers need a clear path to follow and a way to measure their goals. Otherwise the guidelines risk to become "unaccessible" to most of content producers.

Juan Luis Lara
WCAG2-espa coordinator

SIDAR (Seminario Iberoamericano sobre Discapacidad y Accesibilidad en la Red) is a permanent working group devoted to promote accesibility in new technologies and web accesibility as its core concern. Its members are volunteers from all over Latin America, Portugal and Spain are experts in IT and accessibility.

WCAG2-espa is a Spanish translation group focused on WCAG 2.0, formed when the first working draft was released. We would like to thank the opportunity the Working Group is offering the web community requesting comments on their work.

Juan in Madrid

juanluis@sidar.org