Re: Success criteria not applicable

Shawn Henry wrote:
 > Here's the text I referred to in the EOWG teleconference,
I had to leave early so I missed that discussion but I have read the 
minutes.

I just think that it would be useful to provide guidance on what is 
meant by "not applicable". "No content" would be useful as an 
explanation somewhere in the document.

It is confusing, I think, to mark a guideline as not applicable because 
the dependant success criteria are not applicable. For example 2.3 
Seizures is marked as N/A. Surely it is applicable, even if there is no 
flashing content. The designers have avoided flashing content, so they 
have complied with the SC, so it is not logical to say that it doesn't 
apply. Otherwise there are only two outcomes, Fail or N/A, so you can't 
pass.

My main concern is that there should be some clarification, but it would 
be more appropriate in WCAG than in the BAD report. I'm more concerned 
that it is something that is missing from the WCAG techniques than from 
this report.

Alan


Shawn Henry escribió:
> 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
>>
> 
> 
> 


-- 
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 Tuesday, 6 October 2009 08:37:00 UTC