Re: Success criteria not applicable

Here's the text I referred to in the EOWG teleconference, from Understanding WCAG 2.0: 
"Conformance to a standard means that you meet or satisfy the 'requirements' of the standard. In WCAG 2.0 the 'requirements' are the Success Criteria. To conform to WCAG 2.0, you need to satisfy the Success Criteria , that is, there is no content which violates the Success Criteria.. 

Note: This means that if there is no content to which a success criterion applies, the success criterion is satisfied."

- http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-conformance-whatis-head

For the BAD reports,
One could suggest that "no content" would be a better marker to match this wording.
One could argue that "not applicable" is better because it is more common.
(I, for one, don't feel strongly either way.)

Alan, are you suggesting something more specific?

~Shawn

Alan Chuter wrote:
> 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
>

Received on Monday, 5 October 2009 14:21:57 UTC