Unifying ATAG and UAAG in 4.2 (or surrogate)

So. From the call today (yes, hell froze over and I was on the call), 
I mentioned that ATAG and UAAG are the forgotten children of Web 
accessibility. A lot of noncompliant Web sites are noncompliant out 
of ignorance; their owners don't even know that ATAG and UAAG exist. 
But everyone knows WCAG exists.

An advantage of using WCAG to tell authors that relevant portions of 
their sites have to comply with UAAG (as 4.2 presently suggests) and 
also ATAG is that authors would then no longer be working in 
ignorance. They'd have to make a conscious decision to comply or not.

<http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/#technology-supports-access>

But, just as ATAG and UAAG are forgotten, in the current 4.2, ATAG is 
forgotten. So I have a proposal.

NEW VERSION OF 4.2 (or whatever we call it), using plain language

GUIDELINES
1. If your Web content also has functions of an authoring tool, those 
functions must meet the relevant portions of ATAG.

2. If your Web content also has functions of a user agent, those 
functions must meet the relevant portions of UAAG.

Then, in our techniques document, we go through many of the known 
examples at the time we finalize UAAG.

a. If your content allows other people to add their own content 
(e.g., a blogging tool), then you need to conform to [whatever 
sections] of ATAG.

b. If your content allows users to assemble slideshows (e.g., a 
photo-sharing application), then you need to conform to [whatever 
sections] of UAAG.

Advantages:
* We stay general in the guidelines but name actual categories out 
there in the real world in the techniques.
* We cover some stubborn but common accessibility issues, like 
blogging tools and (let's name names!) Flickr. (Photostack not so 
much: <http://photostack.org/>.)

This could need finessing, but it's not bad, I don't think.

Loretta worries about authorizing subsets of UAAG. But not all 
portions will be relevant to all Web content. Let's just make things 
easier for authors in our techniques-- we can give them a list of 
UAAG checkpoints that are known to be relevant.

-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
     Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 22:08:54 UTC