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DRAFT Requirements for WCAG 2.0

Editor: Wendy Chisholm, W3C

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Status of this document

This is a W3C Working Draft. ....

The purpose of this document is to outline the requirements for the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. @@will this document change as we progress? If so, then we need some sort of clause here. Refer to the status section of the XML Schema Requirements note.

Send comments about this document to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group mailing list.

Overview

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) defines the characteristics of accessible Web content and outlines techniques to create Web content that meet these characteristics.

Issues that have been raised since the publication of WCAG 1.0 that will be addressed in the next version:

• Variety of audiences: WCAG 1.0 was primarily written for markup-savvy developers. WCAG 2.0 must address the needs of managers, policy-makers, designers, advocates, and others listed in the User-centered design section of this document. This implies using less technical language in an executive summary, and layering the information in some way for the various audiences to help them meet their goals.
• Easy to use: WCAG 1.0 has 2 documents: the Guidelines document and the Techniques for WCAG document. Due to the many links between the two documents, people have commented that they often lose their orientation. WCAG 2.0 must be easier to navigate to find the appropriate information for a particular audience. Refer to the User-centered design section of this document.
• Generalized across technologies: WCAG 1.0 primarily addresses the needs of an accessible HTML page. WCAG 2.0 needs to encompass emerging technologies such as XML-based languages (e.g., SVG, SMIL, MathML, etc.).
• Verifiable: WCAG 1.0 contains many subjective tests and developers have had a difficult time determing if their sites conform to the specification. WCAG 2.0 support materials need to include more information and unambiguous tests for content developers to determine conformance as discussed in the Testing and Conformance section of this document.

One method of addressing these issues is to actively invite interested and knowledgeable people into discussions.

Refer to the Open Issues section of this document for more issues to be resolved for the next version.

User-centered design

Audience goals and needs

The audience of the WCAG series of documents varies in experience, expertise, goals, time available, tools used, and language spoken or read. The goals of our audience include:

• creating an accessible, innovative, international Web site,
• determining if a site conforms to WCAG,
• increasing awareness of the need for accessible Web sites,
• creating policies or laws in regard to Web access.

Therefore, based on a person's goal, their need for information changes. The next version of WCAG should provide the following 3 levels of guidance:

• Terse overview
  • Example readership: policy makers, lawyers, expert witnesses, managers, disability advocates
  • Form it could take: Executive summary
• Rationale and high-level guidance
  • Example readership: designers, authors, popularizers, testers, educators
  • Form it could take: A short list of general principles, such as non-technology specific checkpoints.
• Technology-specific guidance
  • Example readership: authoring tool developers, user agent developers, evaluation and repair tool developers, content developers (including developers of tutorials and documentation and users of WYSIWYG as well as text-editors)
  • Form it could take: Language-specific checklists, examples, code fragments, example sites.

How will we tie these pieces together? Layers? Filters? A database that allows people to slice the data per various axies, such as: browser support, functional limitations, technology specifics, etc.?

Reaching our design goal

The two pieces that are required to make this successful:

1. Usability testing in our drafting process to ensure that the various audiences may easily find the appropriate information. Of particular concern are the needs of international users of our documents.
2. Coordination with the Education and Outreach Working Group (EO WG) to create a suite of information that addresses the needs of our diverse audience. The EO WG has created useful derivative works of WCAG such as the Quicktips and the Curriculum. The "How to get started" project may be some of the glue that we need to tie our documents together.

Testing and conformance

To allow developers to clearly determine if a site meets the minimal requirements of the next version of WCAG, the support mateirals should:

• Clearly identify the minimal requirements.
• Provide information to help authors satisfy the minimal requirements
• Provide information to help authors go beyond the minimal requirements.
• Develop processes to help authors determine whether they have satisfied the minimal requirements such as:
  • Technology-specific tests. Some of these tests may be subjective.
  • A list of tools and a process that may be used to determine conformance (created in conjuction with the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group and the Education and Outreach Working Group Review Teams).
  • A conformance matrix.
  • Snapshots of browsers displaying accessible and inaccessible pages
  • "Aural snapshots" of screen readers and talking browsers displaying accessible and inaccessible pages.

Open issues specific to testing and conformance

• If the next version of WCAG contains several layers, to address the needs of the various audiences, are the layers independent? Should one be able to read the techniques document on its own without reading the guidelines? Should a testing layer be independent of the guidelines?
• Should we define the process of creating a site rather than a narrow document-based view?
• How will we test server-side solutions? If pages are created from a database, is a text-only page still only a last resort? Is this part of personalizing pages? Or an attempt to compensate for inadequacies in user agents?
• Should we allow authors to make claims such as, "I have determined that my site is accessible on the following 7 browsers"

Open issues

The following issues will be addressed by the working group in the course of revising WCAG 1.0:

• Revisit the priorities. Should "do-ability" be included in the priority?
• Enusre that guidance for creating Web content for people with cognitive and learning disabilities does not lead to an attempt to regulate semantics on the Web. Coordinate with ER WG to investigate tools such as summarizers that could perform "semantic degradation" or text-to-graphic tools.
• Investigate the semantics of presentation. Can we say, " separate presentation from semantics?" Or limited to "separate presentation from structure?" Ensure that we do not interfere with the author's ability to convey semantics.

$Date: 2000/11/08 08:27:06 $ Wendy Chisholm