[Draft] EARL Use Case Scenarios
Constructing EARL use cases is a never ending task. However, a comprehensive catalogue of scenarios will help two efforts at the same time:
- serve as a base from which the ERT group can generate clear requirements and objectives for EARL;
- later on, serve as examples which can be inserted into a guide for people new to EARL.
Existing Scenarios
There are already several scenarios which exist in different locations, below are some of these:
Additional Scenarios for Uses of EARL
- Evaluating a Web site using tools in different languages
- A group of people are using different languages to evaluate a Web site, EARL describes the test results independently of the language.
- Evaluating a Web site which serves pages using content-negotiation
- A Web developer is evaluating a Web site which serves pages in different languages according to the Browser preferences.
- Combining results from different evaluation tools
- A Web developer wants to select specific results from different evaluation tools and merge those results into a report.
- Integrating modules which can execute specific tests into a testing environment
- A tool developer develops a Web service which evaluates a specific test. This application does not need to have a full user-interface but can still be integrated into the testing environment.
- Managing large amounts of test results
- A large scale evaluation is generating huge amounts of test results which need to managed effectively.
- Comparing results from different tools against each other
- An evaluator tests the same content and uses the output from different tools to compare them.
- Comparing results from an evaluation tool against a test suite
- A test suite developer publishes the corresponding EARL output for the results in order for evaluation tool developers to compare their tools.
- Generating reports for different purposes
- A Web site owner needs to extract relevant test results and generate reports on how they meet WCAG 1.0 and 508 requirements.
- A multi-national commerce Web site needs to adhere to different national policy requirements.
- In a Web development team, the designer, content author, developer, project manager, etc need to receive reports specific to their roles and tasks.
- A Web developer wants to extract and review items that have been evaluated but have a low level of confidence.
- Monitoring a Web site over time
- A Web project manager wants to track the accessibility of a Web application over time by comparing current test results with previous ones.
- Learning a new specification
- A specification provides examples, test suites, and EARL results which can be used to guide a learner through a testing process (by showing them which way they should have responded, i.e. learning by doing).
- Extending EARL statements
- A tool developer subclasses the EARL result types to provide more granularity within the tool but remain compatible with other tools.
- Content adaptation
- add IMS examples
- add DI examples
- @@@add some more later
- Exchanging data with Web browsers
- A Browser uses the results from an evaluation tool to determine flickering graphics and supress these from the content.
- Exchanging data with repair tools
- A repair tool relies on the evaluation tool to identify specific locations of Web content which needs to be fixed.
- Exchanging data with search engines
- A search engine uses a third-party service which publishes EARL reports of Web sites to return search results from accessible sites.
Last updated on $Date: 2005/03/07 15:29:49 $ by $Author: shadi $