Checklist Prototyping Notes

I took an action item to work on prototyping checklists and have collected some initial notes and ideas related to what information might be included in checklists, how that information might be organized, where the issues are and what needs to be done before we can begin discussing and developing prototypes.

Checklist Items

As a starting point for discussion, I looked at guidelines 1.1 and 1.3 and attempted to list all of the potential checklist items relevant to each guideline. Note that in order to make checklist items into true/false statements, some of the items in this list are slight variations of the actual guidelines, success criterion or technique task.

At the guideline level, checklist items would include:

At the success criteria level, there are a number of additional cheklist items to include: (note: guideline 1.1 items listed below are based on the June 24, 2004 Guideline 1.1 Revisions and are not linked since they have not yet been incorporated into an updated working draft)

At the techniques level, the following checklist items could be included (note: these items are a rewrite of existing tasks as true/false statements and are based on the list of techniques associated with guidelines 1.1 and 1.3 in the June 2 draft of success criteria to techniques mapping.)

Additionally, there may be a number of checklist items that could be incorporated into the checklists in some form. The following list comes from OpenAccessibility Checks:

Views and Sorting

Sorting

There are a number of different considerations related to determining the list questions to be included in a checklist. I've listed a few of dimensions by which checklist content might be affected below.

  1. technology used (HTML, CSS, etc.)
  2. guideline
  3. baseline (where baseline is set may have an impact on which techniques you need to do)
  4. level - checklist content will change based on whether conformance goal is to achieve A, AA, AAA
  5. scope (ex. if claim is for a single page, then techniques and questions related to document collections fall out)

Example sorting questions:

Questions:

  1. How to reference informative, optional or future techniques?
  2. What impact will the question of normative vs. informative checklists have on techniques? Will certain techniques become normative as a result?
  3. How/where do tests/checks fit in? Should checklists include lists of what not to do? (ex. alt text can't be a file name or placeholder text)
  4. Is the list above complete? Are there techniques/concepts missing?

Action items:

  1. Identify sufficient techniques for each criterion. Our current technqiues drafts include a number of types of techniques. Some are already labeled as optional or deprecated. However, it is not currently clear which techniques sufficient or required for conformance within a given technology.
  2. Identify relationships and dependencies between techniques and include references (see also, depends on)
  3. Create checlists mockups that examine how checklist items might be grouped and organized.
  4. Include checklist item information in DTD (not clear whether it would be best to store this data in the techniques DTD or in a checklist DTD)