- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 21:02:18 +0200
- To: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Hi Bruce, all, At 16:57 15/05/2007, Bailey Bruce wrote: >(...) > > Search engine algorithms can change. > >Granted, we do not want WCAG 2.0 sites held hostage to a possibly >capricious WWW search engine. But it sure is convenient to have Google >as a benchmark! It's not just WWW search engines: organizations often rely on search engines developed externally and it may not be clear how alternative versions are handled (if at all), both by the underlying algorithms and in the presentation of search results. Moreover, alternative versions don't need to match page for page (i.e. one file in format X but five pages in HTML); this would complicate the job of a search engine if there are no other metadata to help the identification of alternative versions. (FWIF, I don't support reliance on search engine behaviour as a way to pass WCAG 2.0 conformance requirement #4. If you land on an inaccessible document in a format that doesn't support links or where you can't get to the links, you need to take too many steps to find an alternative: hack the URL to get out of the file (assuming you are not trapped in the first place, but keyboad trap is covered by conformance requirement #6), find a search engine, formulate your query (oh, what was the title of that document again?), peruse search results, ...) Best regards, Christophe -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2007 19:02:27 UTC