Possible characteristics to be used in conformance profiles

Note: this is a contribution to the working group's exploration of the
idea of conformance profiles, and should not be construed as an
endorsement of this concept on my part. This proposal identifies certain
properties of content, based on the current WCAG 2.0 draft, that can be
used to include/exclude specific guidelines or success criteria. No
attempt has been made to optimize for simplicity or for anything else.

1. Non-text - the content contains non-text components.
Guideline 1.1 is inapplicable to content lacking this property.

2. Time-dependent-presentations - the content contains time-dependent
presentations, such as multimedia. Guideline 1.2 is applicable to this
content.

3. Visually styled - the content contains visual styling: fonts, layout,
colour, etc. Guideline 1.4 is applicable to this content. A VoiceXML
application or a strict XHTML document without style sheets are examples
of content lacking this property. If the content has non-text components
or multimedia this property is automatically satisfied. Guideline 2.3 also
applies (why is it under guideline 2?)

4. Auditory-presentation - the content includes sound. Guideline 1.5 and
parts of guideline 1.1 become applicable.

5. User-input - the content accepts user input. Guidelines 2.1, 2.2 and
2.5 apply.

6. Navigation-mechanism - the content accepts user input that causes
further content to be presented. Links are a simple example of navigation,
as are search facilities, menus etc. Guideline 2.4 applies. The
user-input property (see above) is automatically met.

Note: guideline 3.1 applies to all types of content as they all contain
text (even if only as text alternatives).

Parts of guideline 3.2 depend on "navigation-mechanism" and on
"user-input". Query whether there should be a separate property as
follows:

7. Page-metaphor - the content is divided into distinct pages (definition
required). Perhaps the other properties listed above will be sufficient to
sort out the various cases of guideline 3.2.

8. Programmatic-user-interface - the content includes code that interacts
with API's provided by the user agent or the operating system to construct
or control a user interface. This is relevant to guideline 4.2, especially
the references to UAAG and the discussion of custom user interface
components.

I managed an analysis in terms of a maximum of 8 properties, which is
rather better than I was expecting.

Received on Wednesday, 1 September 2004 00:38:34 UTC