RE: WCAG Compliance

Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> 
> Bartimeus Accessibility in the Netherlands had
> its evaluation methodology audited for
> conformance to ISO/IEC 17020: "General Criteria
> for the operation of various types of bodies
> performing inspection" (see the newsletter - in
> Dutch - at
> <http://www.accessibility.nl/algemeen/nieuwsbrief/20060322?searchData=i
> nspectie,rva>).
> 
> I don't know of other organizations in this field
> that did this, so my impression is that it relies a lot on trust.

It is indeed interesting that you use the word trust.  As far back as 2003
I was thinking about this very topic
(http://www.wats.ca/show.php?contentid=49).

Recently, I attended a W3C briefing about POWDER
(http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/), a W3C proposal that seeks to provide a
mechanism through which structured metadata ("Description Resources") can
be authenticated and applied to groups of Web resources. This mechanism
will allow retrieval of the description resources without retrieval of the
resources they describe.  The concept behind POWDER (as I understood it)
is somewhat analogous to the way we "trust" SSL certs: if you trust the
issuer, then you trust the certificate, thus the site that presents the
certificate.

There I met a representative from Segala (http://www.segala.com) who have
been issuing accessibility evaluation "certificates" that link back to
their website
(http://www.segala.com/certificate/accessibility/000904082006/index.htm):
Segala are also part of the POWDER working group, and they currently have
a proof of concept demonstration of how they would use POWDER to
"authenticate", or extend trust, to these accessibility certificates.
Other organizations at that briefing (including TrustE) also expressed
interest in POWDER. (It appears that POWDER will also seek to replace PICS
labeling, where again, users want to have a certain amount of trust
associated to whether or not a web site is family friendly, etc.)

To add to the discussion...

JF

Received on Friday, 3 October 2008 18:23:23 UTC