[techs] Summary of Techniques teleconference 05 November 2003

PRESENT

Janae Andershonis
Tim Boland
Doyle Burnett
Ben Caldwell
Wendy Chisholm
Michael Cooper
Tom Croucher
David MacDonald
Matt May
Chris Ridpath


DISCUSSION

QA work - Janae has been reviewing the HTML techniques for quality,
consistency, etc. She will send a report to the list soon and we discussed
some of the details. We discussed the question of whether all the code
examples should be complete HTML files so people can copy them to an editor
and play with them. We thought it would be good to support that use case but
within the techniques themselves it is desirable in many cases for the
examples to remain as fragments. There are a number of things that need to
be done on future drafts of the techniques for QA:
* test that each technique is a useful implementation of its guideline
* test that everything that should be is present
* find user agent issues with techniques
* clean up grammar

HTML techniques - having converted the checklist item to true/false
statements, they didn't sit well as is. We decided to revert them to their
previous form and call them "tasks"; the concept of true/false checklist
items remains but will be presented just in actual checklists. We also
looked briefly at the abstract, considering that this is the first working
draft of HTML techniques for WCAG 2.0 so it needs to be appropriate. The
draft under discussion was [1] and following this discussion, a new draft
has been posted to [2].

Web page testing - Chris presented work he's been doing. He has created a
database of every conceivable accessibility requirement, at a very
fine-grained level, for use by machine and human evaluation. This is more
detailed than the techniques, and includes positive and negative test files.
The proposal is to map the guidelines and techniques to checks in this
database, resulting in a definition of testing requirements to support WCAG.
Not all checks in this database would map to WCAG as there are checks
designed around other sets of checks. This work overlaps with that of the
Authoring Tools Working Group, the (currently unchartered) Evaluation and
Repair Tools Working Group, and Euroaccessibility Task Force 2. We discussed
issues of process and goals arising from all this, and will continue the
discussion in a couple weeks.


ACTION ITEMS

* Ben: We change the label for "checklist item" to "task" and revert to
older wording
* Wendy, David: Review abstract of HTML techniques


REFERENCES

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20031104.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20031105.html


-- Signature --

Michael Cooper
Accessibility Product Manager, Watchfire
1 Hines Rd, Kanata, ON  K2K 3C7, Canada
+1 (613) 599-3888 x4019
michaelc@watchfire.com
http://www.watchfire.com/

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Received on Friday, 7 November 2003 17:29:04 UTC