· Understanding Guideline 3.1 L1 SC3
· Techniques for meeting Guideline 3.1 L1 SC3
· Benefits and Examples of Guideline 3.1 L1 SC3
3. A description of the education level of the intended audience is available.
Note: This success criterion is in DRAFT form. It is presented to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group as a formal proposal, but it has not earned the consensus of the Working Group, and it does not appear in the current Public Working Draft at http://www.w3.org/tr/wcag20. It is presented here for discussion only. It must not be cited as a normative reference.
Intended audience
The people for whom the Web site, application, or other resource has been created. The audience may be large or small, local or global. The intended audience may be deeply knowledgeable about the topic, or completely uninformed.
Education level
Years of school completed, or highest degree achieved.
There are people with disabilities at every education level. They include people with learning disabilities and cognitive impairments as well as people with physical and sensory limitations.
Readability formula
Readability formulas predict whether text will be easy or difficult to read. Readability formulas assume that longer sentences are more complex than shorter ones, and therefore harder to read. Readability formulas also assume that shorter words are easier to read than longer ones.
In some languages, readability formulas measure sentence-length by counting characters instead of words. Readability formulas for languages that allow more than one script within a single document (such as Japanese katakana and hiragana)may also consider the number of scripts used in the text as a measure of difficulty.
Results of readability tests are often expressed in terms of the education level needed to recognize words andsentences in the text. Thus readability formulas can help authors write content that matches the education level or reading ability of the intended audience.
Delivery unit
[Note: add new plain-language paraphrase approved on 2005-04-28 call.]
A set of material transferred between two cooperating web programs as the response to a single HTTP request. The transfer might, for example, be between an origin server and a user agent.
The intent of this success criterion is to identify the education level assumed by the content. People with learning disabilities and cognitive limitations can use this information to decide whether content is likely to meet their needs.
This success criterion applies to all Web content.
Follow these steps to identify the education level of the intended audience:
1. Identify the intended audience. In other words, who will use the site? What will they use it for?
2. Estimate the highest degree that most members of this audience are likely to have earned, or how many years of school they are likely to have completed. This will be the education level. The knowledge and skills expected at different education levels may vary from country to country, because each country has a different education system. (Note: the International Standard Classification of Education was developed to allow comparison across countries. See the section on Advisory Techniques for more information.)
3. Describe the education level in metadata or in text content, or both.
The following HTML examples use the <meta> element and the Dublin Core <educationLevel> element to describe the education level of the intended audience. (Note: When this Guide to WCAG 2.0 is published, these technology specific examples will probably be replaced by links to relevant places in other Techniques documents.)
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”Ph.D.”>
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”High School science teacher”>
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”General reader”>
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”low-literacy user”>
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”upper secondary”>
· <meta name=”dc.educationLevel” content=”primary”>
· Use the International Standard Classification of Education to describe the education level of the intended audience (see the last two example <eta> statements in the previous section for examples). A description of the levels is available from the US National Center for Education Statistics at : http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/notes/n07.asp.
· The success criteria for Guideline 3.1 Levels 2 and 3 indicate how to go beyond what is sufficient to satisfy the minimum requirement.
This success criterion benefits people with reading difficulties who select content based on education level or readability. Selection may be automatic or manual.
Example 1: Finding medical information.
A user who has dyslexia is diagnosed with cancer. Her search engine lists results by education level. The list is in ascending order, beginning with items intended for readers who have completed fewer than eight years of school and ending with items intended for specialists in the field. The user selects two items from the beginning of the list to gain an overview before moving on to more complex treatments of the topic.
Example 2: An e-learning application.
An online course about Spanish cultural history includes a unit on Moorish architecture. The unit includes text written for students with different reading abilities. The metadata for each version names the academic level of the content and includes a readability score based on formulas developed for Spanish-language text. The learning application uses this metadata and metadata about the students to present instructional content matched to students’ reading level.
· Entry for Audience Education Level. Using Dublin Core – Dublin Core Qualifiers. Available at http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/qualifiers.shtml.
· IMS Learner Information Packaging Model Information Specification, Table 6.3 ‘accessibility’ learner information data structure detailed description. Available at http://www.imsglobal.org/profiles/lipinfo01.html#tab6.3.