cross referencing and following conventions

I firmly believe that following operating system conventions, particularly
those designed to or known to promote accessibility is a basic requirement
in developing User Agents. This is covered in one of our guidelines, which
I think should be moved up the table of contents since so many things
depend on it. In the techniques and notes for this section it should be
pointed out that in a number of cases doing this will automatically fulfil
various checkpoints - that should help focus the minds of developers on
this one.

If we had a checklist like that produced as an appendix to the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines at
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH/full-checklist then it might
also be made clearer. 

In the case of a development task being split among a team I think it is
the clear responsibility of the team leader to ensure that the appropriate
information is given to each part of the team. Cross-referencing to the
fundamental principles at the checkpoint level seems likely to add
considerably to the bulk of the list of checkpoints, and as we have heard
in meetings of this and other WAI groups, the more checkpoints there are,
and the more complex they are, the harder some people are going to find it
to have their particular group engage fully with the document.

This reasoning is only applicable to the case where there are a number of
cross-references to a single point, at the guideline or checkpoint level.
At the technique level, where terseness is of much less importance, I
expect there to be a lot of cross-referencing or repetition.

Charles McCN

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 1999 13:58:31 UTC