Please review: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, Wombat

WAI Interest Group:

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG) invites
review and comment on a new Working Draft of the Authoring Tool
Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). This new Working Draft, currently given a
version identifier of "Wombat," reflects experience implementing ATAG 1.0. 

ATAG Wombat references the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG
1.0), W3C's current Recommendation defining accessible Web sites. As W3C
develops version 2.0 of WCAG, it is likely that ATAG Wombat will move its
reference forward to WCAG 2.0. 

The AUWG invites WAI Interest Group participants, and members of other WAI
groups, to review the Working Draft at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/wombat/010712 for two weeks, ending Monday, August
20, 2001. After this time, the AUWG will incorporate and/or respond to
comments received, and publish the resulting draft as a W3C Public Working
Draft on W3C's Technical Reports page.

This is a preliminary document, not stable yet, with much work still to be
done. If you are interested in comparing the evolving ATAG Wombat version
with ATAG 1.0, please refer to the change list at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/changes (also linked form the AUWG home page at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU ).

At this stage we invite comments on two mailing lists:

- For any comments that you want to be sure are registered and addressed by
the AUWG before publication of the first Public Working Draft of ATAG
Wombat on the W3C Technical Reports page, please send them to
w3c-wai-au@w3.org by Monday, August 20, 2001. Archives of all mail sent to
that list can be read at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au

- For general discussion about this Working Draft, please comment on
w3c-wai-ig@w3.org. That discussion will be monitored by the AUWG. However,
there is no guarantee that every issue raised there will be registered with
the AUWG for formal discussion, as is the case with comments sent directly
to the AUWG list.

The AUWG welcomes comment on any aspect of this Working Draft, but is
particularly interested in feedback on the following issues:

1. Are the checkpoints and guidelines in the ATAG Wombat Working Draft
easier to understand than in ATAG 1.0? Has terminology been used that is
hard to understand? Are there terms that are not listed in the Glossary
that should be?

2. Does the structure of explicitly identifying the rationale, minimum
implementation requirements, and optional advanced implementation pointers
clarify how the checkpoints should apply? In particular, is one version of
the wording clearer than others? (Note that minimum basic functionality
must be met for the checkpoint to be satisfied, but advanced implementation
is optional).

3. Note that there are many open issues marked in this Working Draft that
the AUWG recognises a need to discuss, and that this is just the first of
many Public Working Drafts. ATAG 1.0 had 7 Public Working Drafts, and many
more Working Group Working Drafts, before becoming a Recommendation. We
welcome suggestions on these marked issues. As always, earlier comment is
most useful.

4. Other suggestions or comments are welcome.

This message may be circulated to other lists, but please be careful to
avoid cross-postings.

Thank you for your review,

Charles McCathieNevile, Staff Contact to the AUWG

and

Judy Brewer, WAI Domain Leader

-- 
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE43-355, 200 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA,  02139,  USA

Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 18:33:52 UTC