[TECH]Traffic Cop Gateway Prototype for Integration of Techniques Documents

Over the last few conversations with the Techniques Working Group I've been
presenting a concept I call the "Traffic Cop." 

 

Wendy has asked me to recount our discussions about the Traffic Cop and also
to post a prototype of the "Traffic Cop" for the Techniques Working Group
and anyone else in WCAG to comment on. I have done that and it is here.
www.eramp.com/david 

 

The proposal for a Traffic Cop grew out of last Wednesday's call when we
were discussing the Techniques Gateway. We realized the Gateway really had
two roles.

 

1)       A place for "Technology Independent" techniques such as how to
write a good text equivalent. 

2)       A Gateway to guide people who were coming from 2.0 Guidelines and
who were looking for the proper techniques to help them fulfill the
guideline. 

 

We realized that having these two roles in one document was confusing to
users and that it would be good to separate those two roles. 

 

Hence I brought up the "Traffic Cop" whose sole purpose is to direct people
to where they want to go. 

 

On Friday, Wendy met with Shawn from the Education and Outreach group. She
is responsible for the WCAG website redesign. She has a background in HCI
and spearheaded a usability study of various WCAG documents. Shawn learned
that one of the biggest problems with WCAG integration of documents is that
a link in one document brings the user to the middle of a foreign document
and that disorients them. Shawn recommended we get into the world of
dynamically generated techniques pages that would allow users coming to
techniques documents from the guidelines to see the Techniques that applied
to the Guideline they were trying to meet. This could be generated
dynamically and quite painlessly from our current documents via XSLT (the
joys of XML). Shawn also looked at my first Mock Up of the "Traffic Cop" and
made several suggestions such as putting in the success criteria text (or a
synopsis) into the traffic cop so that people could easily choose a
technique or techniques.

 

Wendy and I spoke by phone on Friday so that she could pass on Shawn's
comments. I implemented the changes as I understood them. On Monday Ben
Caldwell, Wendy Chisholm, Michael Cooper, Tom Croucher and myself (David
MacDonald) had a conference call where we fleshed this out some more. 

 

Overview (minutes) of Monday's Conference call:

 

Some of the ideas that came up on Monday were:

1)       "Will separating the Technology Independent Techniques from the
"Traffic Cop" role decrease the traffic they receive? If we are concerned
about that, could we include a section on each XSLT dynamically generated
page that includes important things to remember (such as how to write a good
text equivalent)?

2)       There is quite a bit of background information in the current
Gateway such as information on different kinds of colour blindness so web
designers would understand the reasons for some of the techniques. Wendy
said that we must be careful to balance between educating people and
allowing them to get where they want to go quickly  

3)       issue: how do we balance between educating people (e.g., about
writing good text equivs) vs people getting to where they want to go quickly
(w/out realizing that there are issues w/writing good text equivs)

4)       We discussed Shawn's suggestion of partial views of Techniques
generated via XSLT as well as complete views (whole doc someone can print
out)

5)       We discussed another use case suggested by Shawn: A tasks view
oriented "Traffic Cop" I want to use forms, how do I make them accessible?"

6)       if people come to WCAG 2.0 first, do we send them to the intro
page? is the traffic cop the intro page?

7)       if have same chunk in multiple documents, that is also confusing 

8)       issues: do each tech-specific technique refer to only one success
criterion? 

9)       issue: do we keep general info in with "traffic cop" functionality?


10)   issue: what are the different use cases or paths through the info?
guidelines->success criteria->xyz->technology-specifics

 

The current Prototype for the "Traffic Cop" is here www.eramp.com/david 

 

Cheers

David MacDonald

 

Access Empowers People.

.Barriers Disable them.

 

www.Eramp.com <http://www.eramp.com/>