- From: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
- Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 12:50:28 -0400
- To: WAI-GL <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
A year or so ago, I wrote: <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2004AprJun/0592.> >Let us all keep in mind a general exception that must be applicable >to all our guidelines: If the purpose of the page (section, site, >resource, document) is to teach the topic of accessibility itself, >it may violate the guidelines. Hence indeed not "all" content may be >accessible. > >It is easy to imagine giving correct and incorrect examples of >accessible methods. We do that already. The incorrect examples, as >Web content, would violate WCAG. > >It is also easy to imagine entire online courses where full Web >sites for imaginary companies are posted, with students expected to >take the sites and fix them. Those sites, with >deliberately-incorrect markup, would not be permitted without an >exception. > >I don't think that "scoping" is a good way to handle this. I suggest >a clear and explicit exception. Jason White wrote in and stated that scoping would handle that just fine, thank you, and, as with most of my proposals, it was forgotten. I am bringing this up again and proposing that guidelines and techniques be updated to include three obvious exception cases: 1. The Web content is used as a teaching example and cannot be made compliant without contradicting (undermining, vitiating) the matter being taught. This case is known from my previous example. If you really insist, I can look up a few pages that instruct e.g. form markup by teaching it in various stages; some pages end up with invalid code because that stage of the elucidation cannot include all the necessary form markup to make the page valid. 2. The Web content is a sample for which a single natural language cannot be declared. This is a case not well imagined by the Working Group (or in PDF, for that matter). There are many examples of Web content that is in fact text yet are not in a natural language. The example I'm providing here is type samples. The documents linked below provide a list of all the glyphs typically required for a font that includes Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek characters. Have a look at the tagged PDF and the valid HTML. <http://joeclark.org/dossiers/FontGlyphSynopsis-tagged.pdf> <http://joeclark.org/dossiers/FontGlyphSynopsis-2.html> We cannot specify a natural language because there isn't one. The PDF accessibility checker, in its default setting of "look for every error," dutifully flags this *as* an error. The HTML is valid, but it flunks WCAG 1 or 2 because it doesn't specify a natural language that cannot exist for this document. 3. The (A single unit of) Web content is provided in more than one natural language. In this case, <html lang="LANGUAGECODE"> will not work. HTML, in its brilliance, makes it logically impossible to declare a bilingual document. (Really, why would CERN researchers in, of all places, Switzerland ever have to write in more than one language?) You can get around this in practical terms by marking up just the sections of your document as being in whatever language they actually are in, but WCAG needs to make such a hack explicitly legal. In summary, we must make room for cases like these in the guidelines. We can't just say that scoping will take care of it, because essentially that forces authors to say "All our Web pages meet WCAG, except these two, which logically cannot meet WCAG." We know about these logical disqualifications up front and it is our duty to accommodate them. -- Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/> Expect criticism if you top-post
Received on Monday, 18 April 2005 16:50:35 UTC