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Edit comment LC-1315 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-1315
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Commenter: Takayuki Watanabe, Makoto Ueki, and Masahiro Umegaki <nabe@lab.twcu.ac.jp> on behalf of JIS WG2

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Resolution status:

Comment: WCAG 2.0 should put more emphasis on the importance of having a list of user agents that the content has been tested on. As pointed out in the comment #2, knowledge of which user agents can access that content is very important.

In Japan, our research [1] showed that Japanese major user agents were divided into two groups: JAWS and HPR can use structure markups and other important functions, while 95-Reader and PC-Talker can not. Most Japanese users do not know the benefits of skip navigation, heading navigation, table-structure navigation, or search text in a page because their user agents do not have these capabilities. (X)HTML is the basic technology which must be included in all baselines but major Japanese user agents cannot use some important accessibility functions of (X)HTML. Thus, we can say that baseline concept is too rough to show which technologies are accessible to users. Information of user agents is necessary to show that content is accessible to users.

In addition to that, user agents might be different among users with various disabilities. It may happen that the same content is accessible to users with cognitive disabilities but not accessible to visual disabilities.

We think conformance claims that include a list of user agents that have been tested on and a detail list of specific capabilities of those user agents is an ideal but we know it requires too much burden to the authors. Thus, we propose that WCAG 2.0 should put more emphasis on the importance of having a list of user agents that the content has been tested on.

[1] Watanabe, T. and Umegaki, M.
"Capability Survey of Japanese User Agents and Its Impact on Web Accessibility",
Proceedings of W4A 2006.
http://www.w4a.info/2006/prog/6-watanabe.pdf
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