- From: John M Slatin <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
- Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 08:01:49 -0600
- To: "Michael Cooper" <michaelc@watchfire.com>, "WAI GL (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
I think it's inappropriate to tie the definition of "testability" to our capacity to develop algorithms. That's *machine* testability, not testability. Phenomena that elude algorithmic testing can still be tested. There's no algorithm for determining whether content is understandable, for example, but it's still possible to test whether or not people understand it, and it's possible for those tests to be rigorous and systematic; it's even possible to use numerican values to express the raters' judgments, and it's possible to achieve high degrees of inter-rater reliability (i.e., agreement among raters). That such judgments are not "objective" in the narrow sense of that term does not mean that they're invalid. John -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Michael Cooper Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 7:34 AM To: WAI GL (E-mail) Subject: [techs] Summary of Techniques teleconference 19 November 2003 PRESENT Janae Andershonis Ben Caldwell Michael Cooper David Donovan David MacDonald Chris Ridpath Lisa Seeman DISCUSSION Web page testing - we discussed a thread that had started on the WCAG mailing list about untestable success criteria, which overlaps greatly with our work. Some of the success criteria are untestable because they lack an algorithm, and our ability to create an algorithm might be part of the definition of testability. Janae noted that the Open Accessibility Checks Chris has been working [1] on might be "atomic tests" in the QA Glossary [2]. We continued a discussion of whether these checks could become a WAI-sanctioned way of validating and supporting WCAG 2.0, and had a lot of questions. It seems that a recharted Evaluation and Repair Tools group would be the place to take this work. Some of this discussion also raised questions of mapping - between techniques and guidelines, and between old and new guidelines. ACTION ITEMS Chris: follow up with group working on testable success criteria Janae: summarize QA WG stuff so we can figure out how to plug into our work Michael, Ben, David: map HTML techniques to current WCAG Lisa: prepare draft of RDF techniques for December 10 telecon REFERENCES [1] http://www.aprompt.ca/oac/ [2] http://www.w3.org/QA/glossary --- Signature --- Michael Cooper Accessibility Product Manager, Watchfire 1 Hines Rd, Kanata, ON K2K 3C7 Canada Tel: +1 (613) 599-3888 x4019 Fax: +1 (613) 599-4661 Email: michaelc@watchfire.com Web: http://www.watchfire.com/
Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 09:01:50 UTC