Edit comment LC-1302 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-1302: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Resolution status:
Response drafted Resolution implemented Reply sent to commenter; Response status:
No response from Commenter yet Commenter approved disposition Commenter objected to disposition
Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
Technical/substantive issue

The section currently provides no guidance to actually choosing a baseline
that can in fact be used accessibly.

I propose that the availability of a user agent which meets level-A
conformance to User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 for the relevant
technology and language be a minimum criterion for the selection of a
baseline.

In this way, selection of a baseline that is not actually accessible
automatically makes it impossible to claim conformance to the
accessibility guidelines. This avoids the situation where it is possible
to construct content that can meet the requirements, but that is not
actually accessible due to the absence of any means for using the baseline
set. Otherwise there is a risk that the value of conformance will be
significantly reduced, since it makes no reliable statement about whether
the content is in fact accessible to real people.

This seems a reasonable requirement given that UAAG is a W3C
recommendation, and does not seem onerous for common web technologies.

cheers

Chaals; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [TEAMA] [] [AL] Propose to reject with comment that it is possible to use non-UAAG compliant user agents to make WCAG compliant content accessible. If, for example, there is no non-text content within the conformance claim, then it is not necessary to concern about using a user agent that can or cannot interrupt the text alternatives of the non-text content. There is not a full correlation between accessible user agent and baseline. Discussed in the 05 April 2007 telecon: Resolution: LC-1269, LC-1270, LC-1302: accepted as proposed with unanimous consent http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/04/05-wai-wcag-minutes.html {not-accept}; Resolution: For a period, WCAG made the assumption that user agents satisfied UAAG. This would have simplified a number of issues. However, in the absence of any user agent for any technology that is fully UAAG-compliant, the working group did not think it was practical to require only the use of technologies for which such user agents exist. The effect of such a requirement would be to make it impossible to claim compliance for any web content. The notion of baseline (now accessibility-supported web technologies) was introduced to make it possible to apply WCAG in environments with a wide range of user agent support for accessibility. It places a much heavier burden on the author to understand the capabilities of his customer's user agents. WCAG will be much easier to satisfy in an environment in which UAAG is satisfied by the available user agents.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)