RE: Applicability of guidelines

John M Slatin writes:
 > 
 > Both WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 are careful to specify that text-only is a
 > last resort in cases where single pages (not whole sites or sections)
 > cannot be made accessible in any other way. And both are careful to
 > require that such text-only variants be updated whenever the
 > inaccessible "original" content is updated. If we go the route Jason is
 > proposing, we'll need to be careful not to open up a back door to
 > text-only variants of entire sites posted simply in order to claim
 > conformance without doing any actual work.

Since my earlier reply does not appear to have made it to the list...

In the scenario John describes, the scope of the conformance claim
would have to be restricted to the "text-only" pages. By assumption,
the other pages don't conform. Thus the developer could not claim that
the site conforms, but only that the so-called "text only" pages
conform. In effect, the developer would have to asserting a true
conformance claim about the "text-only" pages, and not a false claim
about the entire site. This result seems entirely reasonable to me,
and it is in line with the working group's decisions about scope.

The only guidelines in the current 2.0 draft that refer to alternative
versions of content (by contrast with equivalents under 1.1 etc.) are
guidelines 4.1-4.2, and these explicitly require that the user
interface cannot be made accessible (guideline 4.2) or that no
accessible plug-in exists (guideline 4.1).

Thus it appears to me that the problem John raises is handled by scope
considerations and precluded by the wording of guidelines 4.1 and 4.2.

Received on Saturday, 10 July 2004 05:58:50 UTC