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Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group Charter (ERT WG)

This charter is written in accordance with section 4.2.2 of the W3C Process Document.


Table of Contents

  1. Mission
  2. Scope
  3. Duration
  4. Deliverables
  5. Success
  6. Schedule
  7. Confidentiality
  8. Dependencies and Coordination with other groups
  9. Communication
  10. Voting
  11. Participants

Information about how to join the ERT WG is available.


1. Mission

The mission of the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) is:

The ERT WG does this by maintaining a list of existing tools, developing new tools, and documenting techniques that tools may implement.

This work is part of the WAI Technical Activity. The original charter for this group was approved June 1998. This work continues the work of that charter as well as pieces from the Evaluation and Repair Interest Group (ERIG) charter. The ERIG no longer exists.

2. Scope

2.1 Focus of activities

The ERT WG will focus on two categories of tools:

  1. Evaluation - this Web content does or does not conform to WCAG 1.0.
  2. Repair - here is what needs to change to make this Web content conform to WCAG 1.0. Sometimes this repair is performed by the author and changes the source material, at other times this repair is performed by a proxy and is temporary (does not change the source material).

Items in the scope of work are:

2.2 Intended audience of deliverables

The primary audience for the ERT WG's deliverables is Web content evaluation and repair tool developers as well as the content authors, designers and developers that will use these tools.

3. Duration

The ERT WG is scheduled for 24 months, from November 2000 through October 2002.

4. Deliverables

5. Success

To be considered successful, this Working Group must

6. Schedule

A detailed, proposed timeline is available.

7. Confidentiality

Group proceedings, e-mail list, archives, charter, and deliverables are all public.

8. Dependencies and Coordination with other groups

The ERT WG coordinates activity with other WAI Working Groups through the WAI Coordination Group.

The Evaluation and Repair Tool Interest Group charter is not being renewed because discussions of the needs of authors, users, and developers is more appropriate and already lively in other WAI groups. The groups that the ERT WG will look to for feedback and tool needs are:

8.2 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The tools and techniques that the ERT WG creates are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) maintained by the WCAG WG. To ensure that the ERT WG is interpreting WCAG correctly, the ERT WG will ask the WCAG WG to:

Since both Working Groups are in need of test and example pages, there might be a coordinated effort to produce these pages.

8.3 Authoring Tools

To conform to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (ATAG 1.0), a tool must produce content that conforms to at least Level A of WCAG 1.0. Therefore, authoring tools will perform evaluation and repair on existing pages. (Primarily, refer to Guideline 4 - Provide ways of checking and correcting inaccessible content).

To ensure that the work of the AUWG and the ERT WG is complementary and not redundant, the working groups will:

8.4 User Agents

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (UAAG 1.0) provide guidance on developing accessible user agents. This includes some amount of evaluation and repair. In this context, "repair" may be a navigation feature of the user agent. Many pages are considered inaccessible today because of the lack of support of configuration and navigation mechanisms in assistive technologies or user agents.

8.5 Education and Outreach

The ERT WG will ask the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) to review ERT WG deliverables for ease of use and content.

8.6 Mobile and Internationalization

The mobile and internationalization groups have similar content needs and have endorsed the WCAG. Therefore tools that check for accessibility will also provide feedback about mobile and internationalization issues. The I18N group has produced Charlink (aka 'Charlie'), a character checking and normalization tool. Pooling our development resources could result in tools that provide more substantial evaluation and repair of accessibility, mobile, and internationalization issues.

8.7 Tool development at the W3C

The W3C maintains several pieces of open source software including HTML Tidy, the HTML Validator, the CSS Validator, and Amaya. Using our internal W3C connections, we ought to ensure that these tools implement the appropriate techniques for evaluating and repairing inaccessible Web content.

8.8 Quality Assurance at the W3C

The work of a W3C quality assurance activity will include creating tools to test for conformance to W3C specifications. The ERT WG will coordinate with this work to ensure that, where possible, tools include tests for conformance to WCAG 1.0.

9. Communication

10. Voting

The ERT WG will follow the W3C Process for consensus and votes (as described in the 11 November 1999 version). In case the ERT WG is required to vote on a particular issue, each Member organization or technical expert's organization will have one vote.

11. Participants

Participants are expected to observe the requirements of the W3C Process for Working Groups. The following is an excerpt from the 11 November 1999 Process Document section 3.3.1:

Participation on an ongoing basis implies a serious commitment to the ERT WG charter, including:

For this Working Group, the following commitment is expected:

Information about how to join the ERT WG is available on the Web.

11.1 W3C Members

Participation in this working group is open to all employees of W3C member organizations.

11.2 Invited Experts

The following people who may not be employees of a W3C Member organization are invited to participate. Those who:

are invited to participate. Participation is subject to Chair approval.

11.3 W3C Team

11.4 Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)

The purpose of the ERT WG is to produce public documents and tools available royalty-free to everyone, following W3C standard IPR terms. Therefore, anyone commenting in the ERT WG will be considered to offer these ideas as contributions to the ERT WG documents and tools. Organizations with IPR in areas related to the Techniques for Accessibility Evaluation and Repair tools must disclose IPR as described in the W3C Process regarding IPR and W3C's IPR fact sheet. Invited experts are required to disclose IPR claims in the same manner as individuals from W3C Member organizations.

11.5 How to join

Information about how to join the ERT WG is available.


$Date: 2001/06/18 22:14:30 $ Judy Brewer, Wendy Chisholm

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