- From: Jukka Korpela <jukka.korpela@tieke.fi>
- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 14:13:20 +0200
- To: wai-ig list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Jon Hanna wrote: > I seem to recall that the EU were talking > about priority 1 for a certain deadline to be followed by > priority 2 for a later one. There is specific statement by the Parliament that makes priority 2 the current goal: "[The European Parliament,] 30. Stresses the fact that for websites to be accessible it is essential that they are double-A compliant, that priority 2 of the WAI guidelines must be fully implemented;" http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2002-01 47+0+DOC+SGML+V0//EN > This seems a reasonable practical response to the > reality of there being a large number of inaccessible > pages and practices in use. I don't think it's necessarily a good strategy. To take my favorite example, achieving priority 1 conformance (in reality, as opposite to what checkers might say at least when misinterpreted), you would need to check each and every word of each and every document and use language markup (lang and/or xml:lang attributes, introducing new markup elements when needed) whenever there are phrases or words (e.g., names) in a language other than the main language of the document. This is a time-consuming thing, even if good editing tools are available. And it's something to be aimed at, but hardly as more urgent than any priority 2 or 3 checkpoints. It would probably be better if there were no "priorities", no A/AA/AAA classification, no "levels", just a set of rules. It would be useful to characterize the rules according to their current practical impact _and_ implementation difficulty, but this should be a changing document which is not part of the guidelines document, and it could be locally modified for particular environments. -- Jukka Korpela, senior adviser TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre http://www.tieke.fi/ Diffuse Business Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All: http://www.diffuse.org/accessibility.html
Received on Tuesday, 5 November 2002 07:13:53 UTC