Success criteria not applicable

In the evaluation report of the Before-and-After Demo many of the 
success criteria are marked as "N/A" (not applicable). In my experience 
this is a cause of confusion. Accessibility evaluation reports may flag 
a success criterion or checkpoint as not applicable when:

* The construct or element is not supported by the technology used.
* The specific element concerned does not appear in the content.
* The problem does not arise (like colour difference in black and white 
content, or that there is no need to divide content into sections when 
it is brief).

The UWEM methodology [1] tries to define the applicability using XPath 
expressions where possible, restricting it to specific markup elements 
and attributes or CSS selectors. WCAG 2.0 is much broader, defining it 
at the level of the technology used, such as "HTML and XHTML."

It might be useful guidance to make this explicit in the BAD reports, 
but even more, the WCAG WG could give its opinion to make clear when a 
success criterion can be flagged as "not applicable" in a conformance 
report. This would be at a global level, not for each technique (for now 
at least).

regards,

Alan


[1] http://www.wabcluster.org/uwem1_2/
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/demos/bad/draft/2009/report/before/home.html

-- 
Alan Chuter
Departamento de Usabilidad y Accesibilidad
Consultor
Technosite - Grupo Fundosa
Fundación ONCE
Tfno.: 91 121 03 30
Fax: 91 375 70 51
achuter@technosite.es
http://www.technosite.es

Received on Monday, 5 October 2009 07:25:10 UTC