RE: First draft: proposal for guideline 4.2 level 1

Gregg Vanderheiden writes:
 > Hmmmmm
 > 
 > As Joe asked...
 > Are there any user agents that meet all of the specified UAAG requirements?

For the latest I suggest referring the question to the UAAG working group.
 > 
 > I believe that we DO need to put responsibility where it belongs -- and have
 > been advocating for guidelines that do not make the author make up for the
 > shortcomings of the user agent (regular or AT).   But if we word things this
 > way -- then we make it impossible to conform to the guidelines until the
 > user agents do such and such.   Doesn't that put the authors in a worse
 > position than what we were proposing before?

No, I don't think so. All of our other proposals either give no
guidance on when a technology can safely be relied upon, or set more
stringent requirements for backward compatibility and widespread
support. The present proposal is less onerous: it demands only that
there be one "accessible" implementation of the technology, where
"accessible" is glossed by reference to UAAG 1.0, the only
specification in this area.

As mentioned in an earlier contribution, WCAG should not settle for a
subset of UAAG, as that would be tantamount to a de facto
renegotiation of the UAAG conformance scheme by requiring in WCAG less
than the minimum prescribed in UAAG.

At least with this proposal the content author has clear,
technology-independent, guidance stipulating under what circumstances
a technology is deemed sufficiently well supported, in an accessible
manner, to be used.

Variants of the proposal are of course possible, subject to the
worries expressed above.
 > 
 > Also, do we require anywhere that the content tell the user which user agent
 > they need to use to qualify for item #3?
 > 
No. Strictly, we can't require that the content tell the user anything
at level 1, since that would impose constraints on the presentation.

Received on Sunday, 12 September 2004 00:22:43 UTC