RE: ACTION-147: Draft introductory material for techniques about 1) (alternate) mechanisms must conform themselves; 2) examples may not mean all SC; 3) "must" in tech applies to technique, not SC (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group)

I think we should not use the word "must" in techniques (to avoid obvious confusion and misinterpretation of techniques as formal WCAG requirements)    use a different word/phrase in techniques (for example, instead of "you must" say "in order to complete this technique, it is necessary to..") etc.

Thanks and best wishes
Tim Boland NIST

________________________________
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Michael Cooper [cooper@w3.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 6:42 PM
To: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
Subject: Re: ACTION-147: Draft introductory material for techniques about 1) (alternate) mechanisms must conform themselves; 2) examples may not mean all SC; 3) "must" in tech applies to technique, not SC (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group)

Proposal: add a new section in the techniques intro after the "testing techniques" section, with title "Application of techniques", and content as follows.

Techniques in this suite often contain code samples to show the technique in practice. These samples exemplify the technique but do not necessarily exemplify all aspects of good code practice or features needed to conform to other success criteria. This is to keep the examples brief and facilitate understanding of the central point of the sample. Accordingly, authors should not copy these examples in production code unless they provide the missing functionality. In addition to inline code samples, many techniques provide "working examples" that are more complete. Such samples are more appropriate as a starting point for production code, although even these may have minimal content.

Many techniques describe how to provide alternate mechanisms to access content. It is important to remember that such alternate functionality must itself conform to WCAG 2.0. A given technique may focus on the basic way to provide the alternate mechanism, but authors need to follow additional relevant techniques to ensure the alternate mechanism meets requirements.

Some techniques use the word "must". Because this is not a normative document, this word is not used in the sense of RFC 2119, as it is in WCAG 2.0. The colloquial use of the word "must" describes proper application of the specific technique under consideration. It does not imply requirements beyond the scope of the technique. This means it does not impose requirements on interpretation of the Success Criterion to which the technique relates.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:

ACTION-147: Draft introductory material for techniques about 1) (alternate) mechanisms must conform themselves; 2) examples may not mean all SC; 3) "must" in tech applies to technique, not SC (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group)

http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/track/actions/147

On: Michael Cooper
Due: 2011-09-15

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--

Michael Cooper
Web Accessibility Specialist
World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative
E-mail cooper@w3.org<mailto:cooper@w3.org>
Information Page<http://www.w3.org/People/cooper/>