Authoring Tool Guidelines Working Group
Issues List for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
This document provides a guide to issues that were resolved by the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines Working
Group (AUWG) during the creation of the Authoring
Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 W3C - Recommendation (ATAG 1.0). The list
was updated regularly as new issues were raised or resolved. Issues and resolutions
were drawn from meetings of the WG or from the email list w3c-wai-au@w3.org.
Issues for the new version of ATAG are listed in the Wombat
issues list.
Unresolved Working Group Issues
There are no outstanding issues for ATAG 1.0.
Resolved Working Group Issues
Issues raised since Recommendation
Issues raised during proposed recommendation
Issues raised during last call
Issues raised before last call:
- Preventing inaccessible content from being
Published
- Use of Placeholder ALT text
- Should these guidelines include making the User Interface
Accessible?
- Scope of Guidelines
- Positive/Negative reinforcement
- Rating of priority
- Complete Guidelines or sample Guidelines
- Authoring tool inserting or removing code without
the consent of the user
- Generating Standard Markup
- Separation into Guidelines and Techniques documents
- VRML and other formats (GIF, WebCGM, DrawML, etc)
- What to do about non-interactive tools (eg pdf2html
by email)
- Should we be describing required views?
- Navigating the document structure
- Do accessiblity features need to be provided
by tools themselves, or can some be satisfied by interfaces?
- Providing pre-written descriptive text for multimedia
content.
- Conformance to other Guidelines
- Conformance to these Guidelines
- Should there be a division between producing accessible
output and making the tool accessible?
- Configuring and Disabling Accesibility features
- Definitions
- Browser sniffing to serve customised content
- Adequacy / Redundancy of Guidelines, checkpoints,
Techniques
- Separate structure from presentation in the User
Interface
- Issue: Should the user be prevented from Publishing inaccessible
material? Can an Authoring tool make the judgement accurately? Would this
make a tool unsaleable:
- Raised: Jan
Richards, February 1998
- Resolved: Teleconference, November 5 1998
- The tool cannot stand in the way of the user publishing. No tool can
be relied on to know better than any user what is accessible. This capability
may be a marketing advantage or disadvantage. The question is whether
it is important for accessibility.
- Teleconference May 1999: The
user may be able to override accessibility warnings, and we are happy
with that.
- Checkpoint 4.3 (in Last Call draft).
- Issue: Should Authoring tools provide a default ALT text,
or or a null one, as a placeholder where none is specified by the author?
- Raised: Daniel
Dardailler, February 1998
- Resolved: This should not occur. See
- Issue: Should these guidelines apply to
- WYSIWYG editing
tools?
- Tools which allow 'save as HTML' (e.g. word processors, desktop publishing
tools)
- Automatic 'on the fly' converters
- Multimedia generation tools - for graphics, audio, video, etc
- XML generators, SGML generators, etc
- Raised:
- Resolved: Scope of the guidelines is to cover generation
all tools which generate Web content.
- Issue: Should there be encouragement for authors who have
made achievements, to deflect from the perception that accessibility is simply
extra work to be done?
- Raised: Will
Loughborough, February 1998
- Resolved: Yes.
- Issue: Should the guidelines and techniques be given a
scale of priority?
- Raised: Jutta
Treviranus - February 1998
- Resolved: Rating of techniques or guidelines will follow
the same standards applied in Page Author group. Teleconference, Monday March
2 1998 - rough minutes at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au/1998JanMar/0024.html.
The rating scheme has changed in Page Author since then, and also been adopted
by the User Agent group. This group and User agent has changed its rating
scheme to keep consistency with Page Authoring Guidelines.
- Issue: Most tools do this at the moment in one way or another.
Can they be relied on to ensure accessibility of hand-authored code?
- Raised: Charles
McCathieNevile, May 1998
- Resolved: 26
January Teleconference: Tools must not remove accessible structure. 5
May teleconference: Tools must recognise and preserve accessibility features
in conversion.
- Issue: Should authoring tools be required to generate W3C
Standard markup, or should they use (propietary or otherwise) extensions?
- Raised:
- Resolved:Teleconference,
24 February: They should use W3C markup when possible, and must use a
published Document Type which does not interfere with accessibility
- Issue: Should these Guidelines be separated into a normative
Guidelines document and an informative techniques document?
- Raised: Several times, by different people
- Resolved: 26
January Teleconference: Differentiate Guidelines, Checkpoints and techniques.
Face to Face meeting, 1-2 March:
There will be a normative version of the document which does not include techniques,
and an informative version of the document which does..
- Issue: To what extent do the guidelines cover tools which
are non-interactive. In particular, how do they deal with required information
such as ALT text which is not available from the original material?
- Raised:
- Resolved: Guidelines are required to deal with conversion
tools of all kinds.
- Issue: Should authoring tools be required to provide certain
views of a document? Is this making unreasonable demands of manufacturers?
- Raised: Will
Loughborough, February 1998
- Resolved: No longer part of the document
- Issue: How should we deal with conformance to Page Author Guidelines?
- Raised:
- Resolved: Teleconference on 7 April resolved to require
conformance at equivalent priority levels.
- Issue: What is conformance to these guidelines?
- Raised:
- Resolved: Conformance statement was adopted similar to
that in WCAG.
- Issue:
- Simplicity of the document
- Making it easier to avoid making the tool accessible (which is "extra
work")
- Raised: Ian Jacobs, Face
to Face meeting March 1999
- Resolved: Face to face meeting, May 1999: Have one guideline
dealing with making the tool accessible.
- Issue: Should users be able to disable accessibilty warnings
completely?
- Raised:
- Resolved: Teleconference 26 May 1999: It is implicitly
possible. The group is satisfied with that.
- Issue: What does '(in)accessible' mean? Is it defined by
conformance to Page Author Guidelines or User Agent Guidelines (as applicable)?
- Raised:
- Resolved: New definition agreed by working group
- Issue: Too much redundancy makes the document too long,
and difficult to read or use. Too little redundancy makes it too dense to
be readily comprehensible. To what extent should we incorporate material which
is included in documents to which we refer?
- Resolved: Instances are raised and resolved many times
in the process of review. At last call, the working group feels that it has
resolved this issue.
- Issue: If there is a function whose apparent effect is
formatting (such as to indent text), then whatever its function in the structure
of the document is ntended to be, it will be understood by the user as performing
the formatting function (.e.g. be regarded as the 'indent text' button)
- Raised: Jason White, April 1999
- Resolved: This is addressed by the requirements for adhereing
to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and for promoting accessible design.
Last updated 21 January, 2002 by Jan Richards (jan.richards@utoronto.ca)