Re: Accessibility and Conformance, etc.

Errrm,

we are requiring the DOM as the API that User Agents support for
HTML/XML. Over the last couple of months (if I recall correctly, and I may be
wrong) we in fact decided against requiring other forms of access, becuase
the DOM was sufficient). Effectively that means that either assistive
technologies implement the relevant bits of the DOM, or they simply ignore
the guidelines and do their own thing in conjunction with manufacturers of
user agents, doesn't it?

Charles McCN

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Ian Jacobs wrote:

  Eric and I just finished a conversation about his proposals and
  I would like to summarize what I believe to be our agreement about
  the proposals. I am snipping all of the suggestions where we agreed to
  no change in the document.
[snip]  
  We agreed that not only should the document focus on general purpose
  user agents, that it is very unlikely that assistive technology
  developers
  will be interested in making conformance claims. Here is the question:
  if you are a component that is part of a conformance claim, do you have
  to satisfy all of the requirements of the document? In the simplest
  model,
  the answer is yes: you have to allow the user keyboard access to
  functionalities, content that is handled by the component has to be
  available
  through the DOM, the user interface needs to be controllable through an
  API, the user must be able to control styles, the documentation must
  conform to WCAG, etc. [There may be some checkpoints that wouldn't apply
  to individual components but only to the entirety of the subject of the
  claim. Which checkpoints are these?]
  
[and in particular:]

  This means that an assistive technology that would be part of a claim
  would have to implement the DOM, etc. and this is not what we intend
  with this document. We don't prevent that, but the document is clearly
  not meant to make these requirements on assistive technologies.
  
  Proposed: Just make this clear in the abstract, the introduction,
  and in section 3 on conformance. Say clearly that these guidelines
  are not meant for evaluations of assistive technologies.

Received on Monday, 21 August 2000 20:15:10 UTC