PROPOSAL: Resolution of PR#207

There has been much discussion related to checkpoint 2.1.  These are some 
of my observations:

A. Consensus on access to all human readable (if a definition could be 
found) content through the user interface

B. Consensus on access to all alternative equivalents through the user 
interface

C. Currently the group has identified the primary use for access to machine 
readable content through the user interface is for providing access to 
poorly authored pages or technologies that do not fully support accessibility.

The following items summarize the chairs view of the issue:

1. Seems to be most people in the working group feel that people should 
have access to all the information the author is providing through the UI.

2. Difficult to draw lines between human and machine types of content

3. Access versus usability issues: Most techniques for access and 
understand some types of author supplied information would require a higher 
than average knowledge and skill in the technologies that are being used.

4.Source seems to be a least common denominator, but is not very usable to 
most people.

5.JW and AG feel that access to element attribute information is an 
important issue for XML (chair conversation)

6. Changes to this checkpoint may impose new requirements and may require 
stepping back to a previous stage in the recommendation process.

=======================
PROPOSAL:
I proposed the following:

1. Checkpoint 2.1 remains the same

2. The minimum requirements are:

A. All views (or view ports, IJ help here) rendered by the user agent 
conform to the guidelines.

B. All author supplied information must be available through at least one 
of the view ports offered by the user agent.  This does not mean that all 
of the information must be in one view (i.e. a source view).  But the 
combination of views offered by the user agent must provide access to all 
the information provided by the author.  For example, non-source view ways 
of providing access to author supplied content not normally rendered 
through the UI:

1. A context sensitive menu capability may provide option to view the 
author supplied attributes for the selected object in a view port.

2. A document information dialog box may provide access to meta element 
information of a document.

C. A source view is typically only one of the views a user agent offers and 
is not very usable to most people.  But it would satisfy access to all 
content, but all other views of the document must still be accessible.  The 
only way a source view would be the only way to satisfy the requirements of 
2.1 is if it was the only view offered by the user agent to anyone (not 
very likely for anything considering conforming to the UA guidelines).

Please comment:

Jon



Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Chair, W3C WAI User Agent Working Group
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
WWW: http://www.w3.org/wai/ua

Received on Thursday, 20 April 2000 11:09:56 UTC