First draft: proposal for guideline 4.2 level 1

At today's meeting I took an action item to write a proposal that
would address the requirement to use supported technologies, under
level 1 of guideline 4.2. This draws heavily on the conformance scheme
of UAAG 1.0.

<proposed>
Guideline 4.2: Use technologies supported by software that meets
accessibility requirements.

Success criteria for guideline 4.2

Level 1:
1. There is at least one user agent of which all of the following are
true:

a. It meets the default set of requirements for conformance at Level A of
the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

b. It supports all of the technologies minimally required to create a functional
presentation of the content [and to operate its functionality - do we
need to mention functionality explicitly?].

[Insert definition of "functional presentation" from Principles of
Device Independence].

"Technology" means "a markup or programming language, content format,
protocol or API".

c. Each of the technologies required to create a functional presentation of the content, is
listed in the user agent's UAAG 1.0 conformance profile.

2. At least one user agent conforming at Level A of the User Agent
   Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 meets the following conditions:

a. If the content provides visual styling, then the user agent's UAAG
1.0 conformance profile includes the VisualText label.

b. If the content contains at least one image, the user agent's UAAG
1.0 conformance profile includes the Image label.

c. If the content contains at least one animated image, then the user
agent's UAAG 1.0 conformance profile includes the Animation label.

d. If the content contains audio, then the user agent's UAAG 1.0
conformance profile includes the Audio label.

e. If the content requires support for author-defined event handlers
in order to be operable, the user agent's UAAG 1.0 conformance profile
includes the Events label.
</proposed>

Options for levels 2 and 3:

Should higher levels of UAAG conformance be required? Should at least
one conforming user agent be freely/publicly available? For more than
one operating system?

Suggestion: The W3C or a reliable third party should maintain a
non-normative list of technologies for which user agents exist that
are believed to satisfy the requirements of the success criteria
proposed above. This would relieve content developers of the task of
applying these requirements directly. The list could reside in
gateway/core techniques or in another convenient location.

Received on Friday, 10 September 2004 06:21:21 UTC