Edit comment LC-1314 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-1314: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Takayuki Watanabe, Makoto Ueki, and Masahiro Umegaki <nabe@lab.twcu.ac.jp> on behalf of JIS WG2; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
Comment: Baseline concept may cause accessibility degeneracy. We may have Web sites that conform to WCAG 2.0 but inaccessible to users.

Baseline concept separates the responsibility of content from that of user agents, which means content authors do not have to pay attention to what kinds of user agents can access their content but just use some baselines. Content authors can use XHTML 1.0 even if not all major user agents can access the content written in XHTML 1.0. (This is a case in Japan. Major Japanese user agents can not use structure markups of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0.) In WCAG 2.0 this inaccessibility is blamed on user agents. If there are major user agents that cannot access the technology included in the baseline, user cannot use the content even if content is made accessible.

Proposed Change:

New subsection "Attention to user agent capabilities" should be included to discuss this issue. Having a good UAAG and public awareness to UAAG is also important.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [TEAMA] [AL] Propose to partial accept with comment (pending better baseline document with added emphasize to list tested user agent, if any)--it is true, but user agent compatibility status with various technology changes frequently. WCAG is designed to outlive such status change. It is the responsibility of user agent provider to disclose the compatibility status. On the other hand, it is not possible for an author to claim conformance to a success criterion if no user agent would allow the content to meet the success criterion, assuming such criterion is user-agent-dependent. Discussed in the 19 April 2007 telecon: resolution: Issue 1220, Issue 1246, Issue 1272, Issue 1274, Issue 1314, Issue 1315 (1272 as amended) based on actions. http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/04/19-wai-wcag-minutes.html {partial accept}; Resolution: The conformance section of WCAG2 has been completely rewritten. The term "baseline" has been replaced by "accessibility-supported Web technologies". The issue of what it means to be an accessibility-supported Web technology is addressed in the section "Accessibility Support of Web Technologies" at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/#accessibility-support . Since user agent and assistive technology support varies widely in different regions of the world, we encourage knowledgeable organizations to become respositories of this knowledge and make it available to authors so that they can make well-grounded choices. We hope that this would also encourage user agent developers to improve the support provided by their user agents.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)