I am archiving this excerpt from the transcript of a US Access Board
hearing on the "refresh" of US Section 508, 255, and the ADA that was
held in Santa Clara, California, USA, on March 25, 2010. The full
transcript of the hearing is available at:
http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#documentDetail?R=0900006480ae8db1
.
Please also note the subsequent set of comments from the Washington
DC hearing on May 12.
- Judy Brewer
SHADI ABOU-ZAHRA: Thank you for the opportunity to testify with the
United States Access Board on Section 508, Section 255, and the
Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines. My name is Shadi
Abou-Zahra, at World Wide Web Consortium, and I am myself activity
lead of the International Program Office. Our comments today are
preliminary as I've had just a few days to study the Advanced Notice
of Proposed Rulemaking in the ANPRM. We would like to provide more
detail, public comments within the coming months.
We appreciate the Access Board, and preparation of this ANPRM. We
appreciate the consideration given to the harmonization, harmonizing
existing requirements in the United States with international
standards developed by the World Wide Web consortium. Harmonization
of standards is crucial for achieving more rapid progress in make the
web accessible for people with disabilities. This can prevent
conflict and technical requirements for developers and prevent
contradictory expectations for consumers. We're looking closely at
section, at sub-section E107, on harmonization. With the standard
the approach is intended to support harmonization on existing
requirements; however, we want to carefully assess the impact of this
section as currently proposed, which includes the number of
requirements in addition to Level AA ("double A"). In addition, we
want to assess the impact of a number of significantly diverging
requirements with provisions in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. These chapters
cover platforms, applications, interactive content, electronic
documents and synchronized media content and players. For instance,
could the requirements that have been added to section E107 create
confusion for developers and monitors? Might present diversions in
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 inadvertently set the standards in other countries?
We commend the Access Board for including provisions in section 413
Authoring Tools that would ensure support for the production of
accessible content. There has been insufficient attention paid to
the role tools can play in enabling more efficient access in enabling
web content, that authoring tools merit consideration in these
provisions. We'll be looking at proposed requirements in the ANPRM
in relation to the guidance of W3C's Accessibility Guidelines.
Finally, we welcome the attention to a number of important user
interface issues in Chapter 4 that apply to browsers and media
players and we'll be examining proposed requirements in the ANPRM in
relation to guidance and the latest draft of the User Agent and
Accessibility Guidelines. I would like to thank the U.S. Access
Board for making available the ARPRM. We will send further comments
in further review. Thank you.
--
Judy Brewer +1.617.258.9741 http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/CSAIL Building 32-G526
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
