Change Proposal: Make "Techniques for providing useful text alternatives" a WCAG deliverable

Summary

This change proposal is to transfer the deliverable HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. This would reduce confusion both within and outside W3C about the provenance of accessibility authoring advice and more clearly separate authoring guidelines from lexical processing requirements for images.

This Change proposal constitutes a reopen request for Issue 31. Rationale is provide in the rationale section.

This draft change proposal appears to be superseded by Re-open Request for ISSUE-31: Author conformance requirements for the alt attribute on images. Accordingly it is not currently planned to submit this change proposal.

Rationale

Disputed content: In general, the HTML 5 specification focuses on defining the features of the HTML 5 language from a lexical processing perspective overly prescribing authoring requirements or user agent presentation expectations. But the section on text alternatives is a notable exception, providing authoring guidance for a specific set of situations and entwining those with the conformance model. This overly restricts authors' ability to meet accessibility needs in certain situations while leaving other situations undefined, introducing confusion on what constitutes a normative part of the HTML 5 conformance model. This in turn has led to difficulty agreeing on the appropriate content of that section, and led to the creation of an alternate version HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives.

Provenance of accessibility advice: The content of this document is focused on conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, not on the lexical aspects of providing text alternatives in HTML. Its status as an HTML deliverable confuses readers about the provenance of the advice. The advice about good text alternatives for accessibility first is applicable to any content technology, not just HTML, and second, as accessibility guidance, is best maintained by people professionally focused on accessibility issues.

External references: Some external organizations (including the US Access Board, the European Commission, and ISO JTC 1/SC 35) have been looking to W3C as a source of guidance for advice on text alternatives but had difficulty because of these provenance considerations. ISO in fact is engaged in the creation of an alternate document that may offer conflicting advice from that of W3C, and the fact that the W3C document is not maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative is a reason that W3C's document is not considered as authoritative as hoped.

Decision on ISSUE-31 "Identification of a systemic pattern of problems based on specific bug reports and their ultimate resolution and identify a solution that specifically addresses the underlying causes." and "Publication of a new version of WCAG that contains sufficient concrete examples relevant to HTML5 which would serve as a suitable reference."

WCAG is not Member-restricted group, i.e., it operates in public. Work on techniques for HTML 5 is being done via a joint task force with the PFWG HTML 5 Techniques for WCAG 2.0 which also operates in public and has recruited broad membership.

Details

1. Remove HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives from the set of deliverables of the HTML Working Group.
2. Request the WCAG Working Group take over development of HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives. The possibility of this has been raised with the WCAG Working Group and it is expected that the group will accept the deliverable, most likely in the form of an "application note" for WCAG 2.0. The document would focus on general guidance for authoring useful text alternatives in various situations. HTML-specific techniques would be removed from this document and published in Techniques for WCAG 2.0.

Impact

Positive Effects

• Clarifies that proper implementation of text alternatives in pages is a question of HTML conformance, while proper values for text alternatives is a question of WCAG conformance.
• Provides a simpler background to frame discussion on other outstanding issues related to text alternatives.
• Makes a general purpose resource more maintainable and referenceable by other content languages for which it is also applicable.

Negative Effects

• Some may be concerned about introducing a reference to an external resource.

Conformance Classes Changes

• Authoring tools may need to remove advice about conformance implications of providing certain kinds of text alternatives.

Risks

None found.

References

References are provided inline.