action item on Accessibility support

 

Sean and I had an action item as follows: 

 

 

* Gregg Sean to define what an AsCT is - a technology or elements of
technology.

 

 

Or report and recommendation are as follows

 

Observations: 

1)  AsCT has been changed - It is now "Web Technologies with Accessibility
Support".

2)  Accessibility support means support from 'Assistive Technologies (AT)
and Accessibility Features  in Mainstream Technologies (AFm).

3)  We (WAI) have not and are not going to say how much AT & AFm support
there needs to be

4)  AT often supports some but not all aspects of a Technology

5)  Even HTML has features that are not "Accessibility supported" by users'
AT and AFm.

6)  It isn't appropriate to say a Web technology isn't "Accessibility
Supported" (FAILS) just because some feature(s) of the technology aren't
supported.

7)  However it can be misleading to say that a technology IS "Accessibility
(or AT) Supported" when some features are not....

8)   ...AND that opens the question of "when is something more
'Accessibility Supported' than 'Accessibility UNSupported'.  Where do you
draw the line?  How much, and how many and how important a feature to fail?

 

Conclusion:

1) We should not think of ALL technologies as HAVING to be 100%
Accessibility Supported.

-          Technologies might be largely supported

-          The aspects and features that ARE supported could be used as long
as there is no RELYING on parts that are not. 

-          (We might need to look carefully at whether unsupported parts can
be USED but NOT RELIED on.  Mostly it looks like they could, but not if some
information was in html and some was in flash where it would be hard to fit
it all together.) 

-          This should also handle things like Technology Extensions that
aren't really technologies in themselves but can be used if they are
Accessibility Supported.

 

2) We should not think of technologies having to be supported by ALL AT in
order to be useful.

-          Companies could use technologies for intranets that worked only
with one or a few User Agents and AT  as long as that is what everyone at
their company has.

-          For the intranet there would have to be broad user agent and AT
support.  WAI will probably participate in listing what the support is but
WAI has no plans to say how much is enough.  This is likely to differ by
environment, language and countries. 

 

Edits to Documents

A) We should change "Web technologies with Accessibility Support" to
"aspects and features of Web technologies with Accessibility Support".

B) We should continue to require that Accessibility Support be based on
"users' AT and Accessibility Features of their User Agents" but not
ourselves (WCAG) define what qualifies as "users' AT  and their user
agents".

C) in the understanding doc possibly include a note something like:   Note:
An identified subset of a technology may be deemed 'accessibility supported'
even if the technology as a whole is not. For example CSS2.1 as a whole is
not widely supported, and use of certain features of it may cause content be
inaccessible; however large parts of CSS2.1 are widely supported and may be
used to create accessible content"

 

 

This is now submitted to the group for discussion. 

 


Gregg
 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.