Request for clarification about conformance comments from Ian Jacobs on 2001-01-06 (w3c-wai-ua@w3.org from January to March 2001) (original) (raw)

To: Greg Lowney

Greg,

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is still processing comments raised during the last call review of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (including your comments [1]). I would like to ask for additional information on one of the issues you raised (our issue 389 [2]). I have replied to your observations below and welcome your additional comments/clarifications.

You wrote [1]:

As has been suggested before, I think a good steps would include:

  1. clearly label techniques as minimal requirements vs. recommendations vs. examples;

  2. clearly indicate when user agents need to implement all of the requirements, any one of the requirements, or select between groups of requirements that need to be implemented together;

  3. clearly prioritize optional steps;

  4. and give examples of how a person would evaluate a
    product for compliance.

I've numbered your points for reference. I would note that we have published a new draft (29 Dec 2000 [3]) that incorporates some of your suggestions and comments. (I will send you a full account of how we addressed your issues once we've finished processing the full issues list.)

  1. The Guidelines has been designed so that all of the requirements are in the checkpoints. Everything else is informative. Section 2 of the document states, in explaining how the guidelines are structured, that informative notes follow the checkpoints:

    "These notes do not state requirements that must be satisfied as part of conformance; they are informative only. They are meant to clarify the scope of the checkpoint through further description, examples, cross references, and commentary."

    Furthermore, in the section on "Related Resources", the relation to the Techniques document is explained:

    "The techniques provided in "Techniques for User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" are informative examples only, and other strategies may be used or required to satisfy the checkpoints. The Techniques document is expected to be updated more frequently than the current guidelines."

    In short, because this document does not refer to a single technology, the techniques are not normative.

    I agree with you that in the Techniques document, we can do more work to distinguish examples, rationale, real-life implementations, references to other resources, etc. However, while this will promote usability of the document, it does not have any impact on conformance to the guidelines.

  2. Section 3 on Conformance [5] explains that:

    "By default, a user agent must satisfy all of the checkpoints in this document in order to conform. A claimant may reduce the scope of a claim, which means that the subject is not required to satisfy some checkpoints in order to conform. Claimants must only reduce the scope of a claim through three mechanisms defined in this section of the document: conformance levels, content type labels, and input modality labels. A well-formed claim indicates how the scope has been reduced."

    (Note: input modality labels were introduced as a result of another suggestion by you; refer to our issue 390 [6] - the all-or-nothing approach has been softened.)

  3. The document uses the standard terminology: must, should, may to indicate "required", "recommended", and "optional". However, there is another layer of priorities (P1, P2, P3) as well. Thus, everything in a P2 checkpoint is required (if you wish to conform Level Double-A.) Anything in the note that follows a checkpoint is either recommended or optional (and thus the terms "should" and "may" are used there).

  4. We have some sample evaluations [7] listed on the Web site. The UAWG has not developed techniques for helping people evaluate user agents for conformance. I think this would be useful, but I don't think that we should hold up the document for this. The Authoring Tool Working Group is developing "Techniques for Evaluating Authoring Tool Accessibility" [8] and we will surely base our own efforts on theirs.

Thank you,

For record keeping: - This email is per an action item at the 28 Nov 2000 teleconf [9] about issue 389.
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2000OctDec/0310.html [2] http://server.rehab.uiuc.edu/ua-issues/issues-linear-lc2.html#389 [3] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAG10-20001229 [4] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAG10-20001229/#Guidelines [5] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAG10-20001229/#Conformance [6] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2000OctDec/0310 [7] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/Evaluations.html [8] http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/ATAG10-EVAL [9] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2000OctDec/0354

Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs Tel: +1 831 457-2842 Cell: +1 917 450-8783

Received on Saturday, 6 January 2001 14:22:15 UTC