- From: Jeanne Spellman <jeanne@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 12:04:12 -0400
- To: User Agent Working Group <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
I found that I had written the response in the spreadsheet, but had not sent it to the group. ==== Response to MS05: UAWG wrote the examples in Implementing UAAG to be illustrative of common uses by people with disabilities. In order to avoid being excessively prescriptive to the browser, we did not make divisions between platform, OS, browser and assistive technologies, knowing that the field is evolving rapidly, and the accessibility feature that is on the browser on one device, may be on the OS on another. See the UAAG Conformance Applicability Note #7: "Relationship with operating system or platform: The user agent does not need to implement every behavior itself. A required behavior may be provided by the platform, user agent, user agent extensions, or potentially other layers. All are acceptable, as long as they are enumerated in the conformance claim." The UAAG Conformance Applicability Note #1: "Recognized Content Only: UAAG 2.0 success criteria only apply to web content and its behaviors that can be recognized by user agents." UAWG has clarified the definition of "recognize". ======= MS05: Examples in the implementation document do not make distinction of content, browser, assistive technologies, and OS We recognize the value of personalizing the examples, but these examples are not implementation examples. They are use case scenarios with no explanation of what is expected of the browser as oppose to that of the content, the OS, and the AT. It is understandable that average users do not understand the roles and responsibilities of content, browsers, assistive technologies, and OS. But the working group needs to provide more sufficient context for a technical audience. We believe this problem is a reflection of the lack of focus in UAAG. Take, for example, the second example from 1.2.2. (Maria uses a screen reader. When a table lacks marked up header rows, the user agent gives her the option to have the first row treated as the table header row.) It is entirely unclear as to what is expected to be done from the example. It is possible for the reader to interpret that: a) the browser is supposed to alter the content without authorization from the content author to change the structure of the table, or b) the browser is supposed to alter what it passes through to the accessibility API, or c) the AT is supposed to figure out the table header row from the accessibility API and present it to the user as such, or d) the AT is supposed to interrogate the HTML code, determine the header, ignore the information from an accessibility API, and present the header to the user Since there are so many ways to interpret the example and the lack of scope of what a user agent is, it is essentially not implementable in reality. Microsoft asks the working group to reexamine the fundamental nature of what a user agent is and rewrite UAAG from top to bottom with a more precise understanding of user agents and what can be done to make them more accessible.
Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:03:59 UTC