Draft checklist for accessibility of technology, comment by 17 March

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group is developing a checklist to guide specification developers in the features needed to ensure their technology enables accessibility to people with disabilities. This is to address not only content markup languages that describe primary content, but also styling languages that impact presentation, APIs that enable manipulation and data interchange, and protocols that tie it all together. Like similar checklists addressing Internationalization, Privacy, and Security, this would enable self-review as a first stage in the "horizontal review" process of ensuring W3C specifications have broad applicability. Using it should reduce effort in providing basic accessibility coverage, and it will aid early identification of more complex issues that may need direct exploration with the APA WG.

The draft checklist is available at:

http://w3c.github.io/pfwg/wtag/checklist.html

This draft is not yet complete, in particular expanded details about each checklist item are yet to be added, but it shows how APA approaches its horizontal review responsibility. We request review from a variety of stakeholders, including accessibility groups who identify user needs and specification developers who might use this checklist.

The following questions may help guide your review:

* Is it understandable how these checkpoints apply to technologies?
* Is this format useful in considering accessibility needs during technology development?
* Would this guidance help inform your interaction with the APA WG on horizontal review?
* Are the checkpoints relevant to *specifications*?
* Are there any missing types of issues specs might have that impact accessibility?
* Within each section, are there any missing checkpoints?
* Is the overall order logical?

We appreciate review of this first version by 17 March 2017, so the APA WG can incorporate feedback in time for an updated draft in April. Comments can be sent:

* by email to public-apa@w3.org,
* as an issue at https://github.com/w3c/pfwg/issues,
* or as pull requests against the master branch at https://github.com/w3c/pfwg/blob/master/wtag/checklist.html

Janina Sajka, APA WG Chair
Michael Cooper, APA WG W3C Staff Contact

Received on Monday, 20 February 2017 21:48:42 UTC