I am not sure this is a good idea as there are several things people need to realise: - WCAG 2.0 has *not* been released yet. Success criteria such as parsed unambiguously and baseline may change significantly before then. I would not recommend completing any work until WCAG 2.0 has been released as a W3C Recommendation - Without spending a significant amount of time reading the documents we need to be careful not to misinterpret particular success criteria. For example, the parsed unambiguously success criteria specifically does *not* require you to validate your documents. - The fact that WCAG 2.0 is difficult to interpret is one of the least of its problems - even in plain English there are checkpoints missing (one Member of the Working Group has just lodged a formal complaint about the lack of cognitive disability related success criteria - a complaint that I have cosigned). Creating a plain English version of WCAG 2.0 will still be an incomplete set of guidelines. - Joe Clark is not talking about rewriting WCAG 2.0 in plain English - he is talking about rewriting the guidelines completely. Writing WCAG 2.0 in plain English will legitimise a document that still has serious problems. - This mailing list (mostly) contains people with a significant amount of experience in the web standards area and not so much in the accessibility area. The irony is that WCAG 2.0 practically ignores web standards entirely. - And finally, there is not yet any evidence that we (Australia) will ever need to refer to WCAG 2.0. HREOC - the governing body - may decide to keep referring to WCAG 1.0 instead of WCAG 2.0. They may also decide to write their own set of guidelines.
Cheers, Gian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lachlan Hunt Sent: Saturday, 27 May 2006 10:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WSG] Accessibility standards - for commercial consumption Nick Cowie wrote: > If it I get what Tony and Lachlan are proposing: > > As a community we take the individual WCAG 2 guidelines (either the > draft or > if and when the real ones) and translate them into language that could be > understood easily by web developers and provided simple check points. That's the general idea. > For example: > 4.1.1 Web units or authored components can be parsed unambiguously, > and the relationships in the resulting data structure are also > unambiguous. (Level 1) > > Translation: All browsers must interpret the structure of web pages the > same way Essentially, yes, but the criteria should be written with respect to the author, not the browser. e.g. Authors must write documents that can be parsed correctly by user agents and should not depend upon any error recovery techniques employed by user agents. > If that is the case where do I sign up. We'll get back to you about that. > My only concern is that all the work we do is not wasted if somebody else > comes out with a more authorative list (ie W3C) The W3C already has the understanding WCAG and techniques documents, which serve a similar purpose, but many authors are finding them difficult to understand. I don't know why, but I seem to be the only one who hasn't had too much difficulty getting through them (perhaps I spend too much time reading specs, so I'm used to the language :-)) > Should we also recommend baseline/s Yes, I think so. > Should we also suggest checkpoints beyond WCAG 2, for example to deal with > cognitive disabilites which WCAG appears to pay little attention to: > http://juicystudio.com/article/formal-objection-wcag-claiming-address-cognit ive-limitations.php That's possible, but we'd need to find some research that's been done in this area and figure out what authors can actually do to help with this. Before we go ahead with anything like this, there's a few issues we'd need to sort out. * Would this work be redundant, considering what the WCAG Samurai will be doing? * What exactly is the scope of the project? * Should we document general usability issues and techniques as well? * How does it differ from the Understanding WCAG 2.0 and Techniques for WCAG 2.0 documents? * What should we call the project? * How should we run the project? wiki? writeboard.com? mailing list? other? * Who should be the editor(s) and who has time to work on this? -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
