Re: Normative status of techniques checklists

On Tue, 11 May 2004, Loretta Guarino Reid wrote:

>
> Jason,
>   As long as we are touching on this topic, let me raise my
> concern about making the checklists normative: what does this
> say about technologies that are not published by the working
> group?
>   PDF is clearly my concern, but this would also apply to
> W3C technologies for which we haven't written techniques documents.
> If checklists are normative, does it become impossible for these
> technologies to satisfy WCAG2 by definition?

Again, without expressing an opinion one way or another about the
desirability of normative checklists, I can think of several solutions to
this:

1. Content written in such technologies could be checked against the
guidelines themselves, with the aid of any non-normative checklist that
might be created. In that situation the developer wouldn't have the same
level of assurance, as with a normative checklist, that meeting the
checklist items satisfies the corresponding guidelines.

2. I think this has been raised once before: it might be possible to
define a conformance scheme for checklists, i.e., a checklist meets the
guidelines by applying them to a technology, then the content meets the
checklist - not sure whether this would be possible under W3C policy,
though. That way the content wouldn't conform to the guidelines directly
but the checklist would, just as an authoring tool conforms to ATAG and
this gives a higher probability that content produced via that authoring
tool will meet WCAG.

There might well be other options.

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 20:39:46 UTC