Edit comment LC-2671 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-2671: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Duff Johnson <djohnson@commonlook.com>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Comment:
INTEROPERABILITY IGNORED

I have this same complaint about WCAG 2.0 but the same problem is enormously magnified when the scope blooms (as per WCAG2ICT’s remit). Interoperability is key not only to developing agreement on outcomes but in the economics of software development and real-world adoption.

As an economic matter, accessibility is an area that lends itself to the question of conformance and thus potentially, to litigation. If vendors cannot (or believe they cannot) achieve agreement on the technical means of conformance they will tend to shy away from developing in these areas. Application of WCAG 2.0 “directly as written” to non-Web ICT does little or nothing to assist developers who find they have to climb into web-based concepts that may be entirely alien to them simply to begin a conversation about developing towards accessibility.; Related issues: LC-2663
(space separated ids); WG Notes:; Proposed Resolution: It is not clear exactly what change you are suggesting to address this question of interoperability. Part of the effort of this committee is to create language that allows rules to be harmonized internationally, but also harmonized across content types. For example if a document is distributed off of the web but also posted to the web it would be much better for authors if they didn’t have to follow different sets of rules. Also if interactivity or a game-like activity is added to an educational document, it would be helpful if it didn't suddenly become subject to a completely different set of rules. Due to the scope of the committee’s work, we must simply provide clarity about applying the more general principles in the guidelines and success criteria to non-web ICT. Specific techniques will have to be developed outside of this group, as were developed in support of the original Section 508. As for conformance, testing for conformance is definitely not an easy task as many accessibility principles require manual checking by humans rather than automated verification. No matter which accessibility standards are applied (ISO, WCAG, etc.) there will always be an issue with the amount of manual verification that must be done and the cost/burden to complete it. Tools could be developed to make conformance checking easier, but there will always be a manual aspect to the verification.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)