RE: Testing of 14.1 (WCAG 1.0)

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> Simple examples include checking the vocabulary used against 
> relatively small vocabularies - -

That's a good idea, but in general, this requires fairly complex technology,
including morphological analysis. For English, the vocabularies could be
made to contain all the inflected forms of words, or very simple morphology
analysis (just recognizing suffixes like "-ed" and "-ing") could be applied.
For most languages, it's much more difficult.

In principle, it would be possible to analyze the grammatic structures as
well and to estimate readability according to the complexity of the grammar.
This would be more advanced than just counting lengths of words and
sentences. In fact, short but grammatically "loaded" expressions, with
complex morphology and rarely used syntactic forms, can be much harder than
a lengthy explanation in everyday language.

There are some grammar checking and even grammar correction functions in
some text processing systems. At present, one would need to use them
separately, e.g. to open a copy of an HTML document in a sufficiently new
version of MS Word and see what checks and analyses can be performed on the
texts. ("A copy", since we don't want to have MS Word actually _change_ our
HTML documents!)

> And for the real answer:
> 
> Inclusion Europe - http://www.inclusion-europe.org - do test 
> their content for ease of reading

Do I miss something? That site sounds very interesting, and they even have
"Welcome" in different languages (some of those words even correctly
written) that are links to general overviews of their mission, but where's
the information to Web authors about how to make their pages more accessible
and how to test accessibility? Sorry if sound sarcastic (I easily do), but
I'm really disappointed.

-- 
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehittämiskeskus ry
Finnish Information Society Development Centre 
Salomonkatu 17 A, 10th floor, FIN - 00100 HELSINKI, FINLAND
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399 
http://www.tieke.fi  jukka.korpela@tieke.fi

Received on Wednesday, 13 March 2002 04:40:03 UTC