LAST CALL: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

To: WAI Interest Group

LAST CALL: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have now entered "Last Call"
status. Within W3C, "Last Call" status signifies a final review period
before Proposed Recommendation. Assuming no critical issues emerge during
Last Call, the document then goes to W3C Member organizations for review
regarding whether or not it can become a W3C Recommendation. 

Many of you may have looked at or used the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines over the past several months. Since this is your last
opportunity to comment, we urge you to do a comprehensive review of the
Working Draft, and to forward your comments to <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org> as
described in the "Last Call" message below.

Last Call closes on March 19, 1999. The Working Group will not be able to
incorporate Last Call comments received after this date.

You may forward this message to other organizations that have an interest
in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If you do so please cc
<jbrewer@w3.org> on the forwards. Comments from external organizations
should be sent to <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org> (public) or <w3c-wai-cg@w3.org>
(private) as in the message below.

Regards,

Judy

LAST CALL MESSAGE FOLLOWS

From: Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
Organization: W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
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        hagino@w3.org, jutta.treviranus@utoronto.ca, jongund@uiuc.edu,
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CC: dd@w3.org, jbrewer@w3.org, chairs@w3.org, w3t-nerd@w3.org,
        w3c-wai-cg@w3.org, ij@w3.org
Subject: Last Call for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

* Document to review: 
      [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-19990226/
 * Last call ends:   March 19, 1999
 * Send comments to: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org

With this call for review, the W3C "Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines"
[1] enters the "last call" period. 

This document, formerly entitled "WAI Page Author Guidelines,"
is part of a series of accessibility guidelines
published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. The series also
includes the "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines" and the "Authoring
Tool Accessibility Guidelines." 

Until March 19, 1999, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Interest
Group, Chairs of W3C Working Groups, and interested parties are
invited to review this document and send suggestions and comments to
w3c-wai-gl@w3.org. Comments and responses to them will be archived [2]
for public reference. Comments that you wish to keep private to W3C
Members may be sent to w3c-wai-cg@w3.org.

To ensure that dependencies with other W3C Working Groups have been
addressed, we urge the following Working Group Chairs to review the
document before the end of the last call period:

  Judy Brewer, Chair WAI IG
  Angel Diaz, Chairs Math WG
  Jon Gunderson, Chair WAI User Agent WG
  Tatsuya Hagino, Chair Mobile WG
  Philipp Hoschka, Chair SYMM WG
  Chris Lilley, Chair CSS & FP WG
  Steven Pemberton, Chair HTML WG
  Jutta Treviranus, Chair WAI Authoring Tool WG
  Misha Wolf, Chair I18N WG

Once the last call period has ended, all comments have been evaluated,
and the W3C Director has reviewed the document, the Working Group
anticipates that the Guidelines will become a Proposed Recommendation.

  * Background

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines explain to Web content
developers how to make their pages more accessible to people with
disabilities. Following these guidelines will also make pages more
useful to people using a broad range of devices (desktop browsers,
voice browsers, mobile phones, automobile-based PC's, etc.)  and to
search engines. Tools that create Web content (HTML editors, document
conversion tools, tools that generate Web content from databases)
should generate content that is consistent with these guidelines.

The Guidelines have been organized as follows:

    1) There are sixteen "guidelines" (principles
       of accessible design, not prioritized).
  
    2) Each guideline specifies one or more 
       prioritized "checkpoints" that explain 
       how authors can satisfy the guideline.

    3) An appendix document [3] lists all the checkpoints in the
       Guidelines, organized by subject and priority level.

This version of the Guidelines includes a conformance statement that
explains how documents or processes may claim conformance to the
Guidelines.

The Guidelines are accompanied by another document, entitled
"Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines." The Techniques
Document explains in detail how authors may implement the checkpoints
enumerated in the Guidelines. Please note that the non-normative
Techniques Document, which continues to evolve, is not entering last
call (although comments about techniques are still welcome).

The Guidelines have been produced by the W3C WAI Page Author
Guidelines Working Group [4] as part of the WAI Web Accessibility
Initiative [5].

Sincerely,

Chuck Letourneau, Co-chair 
Gregg Vanderheiden, Co-chair 
Wendy Chisholm, Editor
Ian Jacobs, Editor

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-19990226/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-19990226/full-checklist
[4] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL
[5] http://www.w3.org/WAI/


_________________________________________________________________________
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director,Web Accessibility Initiative(WAI), World Wide Web Consortium(W3C)

WAI Interest Group home page: http://www.w3.org/WAI/IG
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Received on Monday, 1 March 1999 13:48:56 UTC