Updated: 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)

Update from 15 September 2011 call:

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 the techniques document is
not a normative document, this word is not used in the sense of RFC
2119. 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 does not mean the
technique is required to meet the Success Criterion. Further, the word
"should" in the techniques indicates best practice, not a requirement
for that technique.

-- 

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/>