RE: Moving forwards

My main concern with this particular success criteria is in understanding exactly what is required.  Are you suggesting that all abbreviations (including those that are common in practice and/or can be found in dictionaries) be expanded?  And, are you defining abbreviation to include acronyms as well?
 
Rob Haverty
Technical Evangelist
Accessible Technology Group
Microsoft
425-706-6847

________________________________

From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org on behalf of Gez Lemon
Sent: Thu 11/3/2005 8:54 PM
To: WCAG WG mailing list
Subject: Moving forwards




As the deadline for next draft being published is upon us, and
progress through a typical teleconference is painfully slow, I thought
it might be appropriate to thrash out some of the more contentious
issues on the mailing list to save some time. There isn't much
activity on the mailing list at the moment, so I can't see there being
a problem. At least this way we don't run the risk of allowing
important issues to be passed without proper consideration because we
ran out of time, only to find that the next draft is receiving
negative comments that take much longer to address because of the
stage we've reached in process.

It would be really useful if someone who was particularly unbiased
could accurately summarise the discussions, as it is highly likely
that particularly contentious issues will result in groups of people
that feel passionately about a certain issue attempting to overwhelm
contrary views by rewording the same argument in the hope that each
rewording is counted as an opposing opinion.

One of the issues discussed on the 3rd November teleconference [1] was
about moving guideline 3.1 level 3 success criterion 3 [2] to level 2.
To summarise, guideline 3.1 L 3 SC 3 states, "A mechanism for finding
the expanded form of abbreviations is available".

This success criterion is relatively simple enough to implement
(compared to something like captioning, which requires specialist
expertise to be done correctly), and is beneficial to people with
cognitive problems, as well as exposing abbreviations to users of
assistive technology (which benefits visitors whose requirements fall
into more than one category).

A recurring argument against any proposal for a success criterion that
is beneficial to people with cognitive problems is that the success
criterion may be detrimental to websites that are aimed at
professionals. My concern with this objection is that the
organisation's concerned are effectively admitting to an active
discrimination policy, and I don't think that it is appropriate that
our guidelines should be based on such a policy. This kind of elitism
doesn't do anything for web accessibility, and there are many more
situations where this type of assistance would be useful, as opposed
to a hindrance. For abbreviations, it's a simple enough task to
automate the expansion of common abbreviations for an intended
audience in a way that is not obtrusive for those that don't require
an expansion of a particular definition.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/11/03-wai-wcag-minutes.html
[2]http://trace.wisc.edu/wcag_wiki/index.php?title=Proposed_Guide_to_3.1_L3_SC3

Best regards,

Gez


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