

Re: EOWG discussion questions for WCAG 2.0 Working Draft

From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 07:52:46 -0700
Message-Id: <>
Cc: wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>

At 06:12 PM 8/6/2003 -0400, Judy Brewer wrote:
>1. Are the guidelines and checkpoints understandable?

Their "understandability" begs the question "to whom?" The guidelines 
themselves address this to some extent and 3.3 even has "providing support 
for conversion into symbolic languages" which might be an indication of how 
far one might go to satisfy this criterion. There are lots of examples in 
the guidelines of their application to this very document which is a "good 
thing". How far this can be carried with current resources has to be 
decided by the WG. There is clearly some effort to "eat their own dog 
food". Applying the guidelines to the document by testers not involved 
would make sense, but is neither trivial nor inexpensive.

>2. Is the terminology used translatable?

In some sense almost anything is potentially "translatable" to some extent, 
but whether there are concepts so rooted in "Western" philosophy and such 
is another matter. If the culture into which it is to be translated has 
some fixed notion about, e.g. the capabilities of PWD then there's a lot of 
work ahead!

>3. Is the conformance model clearly defined and implementable?

Because it is a departure from the previous model, there's always some 
potential problem with implementation. Organizations who've based policies 
on the old nomenclature will have some extra work to do.

>4. What would the impact of the guidelines and checkpoints be on EOWG's 
>Evaluation Resource Suite?

It would test the proper evaluation of any answer to point 3 - it would 
also require some re-writing of everything connected with Content 
Guidelines per se.

>5. What would the impact of this draft of WCAG 2.0 be on other EOWG documents?

It will require a bunch of editing just to find the answer to that!

>6. Is the structure of the document easy to understand and follow?

Again, "for whom?" The ease of use of any such document will depend heavily 
on the user: some want soup, others salad.

>7. Is it easy to find specific topics within the document?

Since it's not intended for the same purpose or audience as the various EO 
suites, it might not be as significant a factor as it at first seems. 
Newcomers to the field should probably be advised within the guidelines 
that the place to go for everyone except disability access technicians is 
the EO site rather than this rather specializ(s)ed document.

>8. Is it easy to find associated documents such as the Techniques documents?

Again, for the mostly specialists who are the real audience for this, it is 
probably easy enough. The important thing to realize is that WCAG 2.0 is 
not by itself of much use to someone wanting to learn about accessibility 
and actually need not be all that usable until such learning (through 
exposure to EO suites) has taken place.

>9. How clearly does this draft explain questions regarding the transition 
>between WCAG 1.0 and 2.0?

In my personal rather weird opinion it shouldn't even try to perform such 
explanation within the document itself since it has nothing to do with the 
purpose of the document. It could better be served in a separate piece.

>10. How clear and appropriate is the overall presentation of the document?

Insofar as it is "appropriate", i.e. its design for its intended audience, 
it is quite clear. Once again, this is not a document for the casual reader 
wanting to learn about the field, it is for the already-knowledgeable 
specialist who understands the "why" and "who" parts very clearly and needs 
normative expositions of the "how".

In summation: the document must be approached by EOWG from OUR point of 
view and that involves paying close attention to the intended audience so 
that it can be seen more in the vein of an ISO standard rather than an 
"Accessibility for Dummies" undertaking. We cannot expect this document to 
be of use to people who have little/no knowledge of the fact that blind 
people use screen readers and like that. If anything it should be MORE 
technical/jargony and leave the populariz(s)ation to EO!


It's Bad Luck to be Superstitious! 
Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 10:52:49 GMT
