Re: WAI Comments on U.S. Sec.508 NPRM available

Harvey,

At 02:55 PM 5/31/00 -0400, Harvey Bingham wrote:
>At 2000-05-31 11:42-0400, Judy Brewer wrote:
>>For those following the U.S. Section 508 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,
>>WAI's comments have been submitted and are available at:
>>         http://www.w3.org/2000/05/w3cwai-508nprm.html
>I appreciate the thorough and detailed comments WAI submitted. I find
>interesting the 508 generalizations and omissions that you have so
>carefully expressed.

It seemed that in the case of some of their rewordings, that their changes
in meaning from WCAG Checkpoints may have been inadvertent (though very
real). But that is one of the risks that occurs when rewording guidelines
and checkpoints that have already gone through a long period of discussion
among many parties -- some of the phrasings in WCAG may look a little
labored, but they sometimes capture important nuances.

>Your identification that the W3C work has copyright implications poses
>an interesting dilemma to the access board, as they pick and choose,
>and rephrase without W3C permission.

The copyright implications have always been there. The advantage to
publishing accessibility guidelines in a forum such as the W3C includes the
visibility and credibility in the Web industry that the guidelines can
acquire, which helps their promotion. At the same time, the guidelines fall
under the same document-use policies as apply to other W3C work --
essentially these policies are in place to help promote as broad as
possible use of common specifications on the Web, without creating a jumble
of conflicting versions of those specifications. 

In other words, the document use policy is very encouraging of use, copy,
and distribution without fee or royalty -- with some conditions though,
including providing a link back to the original, acknowledging the
copyright conditions, and providing the status of the document; and the
license explicitly excludes permission for modifications or derivatives.
(The document use policy
<http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents-19990405.html> 
is generally linked from any document on the W3C site.)

The document use policy also states that W3C may on some occasions grant
permission for derivative or modified versions. Among other things, this
permission requires enough dialog to ensure that the work will not create
misunderstandings about W3C documents, which have undergone an extensive
consensus-building process. W3C _Recommendations_, in particular, represent
work that the entire membership of W3C has endorsed, whether or not they
have yet implementated that work in their own products.

>The W3C WAI guidelines do refer to W3C recommendations, which do not
>always generalize to new means to convey information. A concern of the
>Access Board is to avoid locking into old and aging technology. Some of
>the W3C enthusiasm for developing consistency among their various, and
>rapidly evolving technical recommendations

Some of the Access Board's changes actually lock their proposed provisions
_more_ into old and aging technology. The WCAG WG (Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines Working Group) is currently looking into ways to
make WCAG 1.0 even more friendly to advanced technologies, and welcomes all
contributions to that discussion -- but I didn't notice things in the
Web-related sections of the NPRM that more adequately address advanced
technologies than does the current WCAG 1.0. 

I think something was missing at the end of your paragraph?

<...>
>Regards/Harvey

Regards,

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

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Received on Thursday, 1 June 2000 16:19:39 UTC