Edit comment LC-1034 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-1034: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Gian Sampson-Wild <gian@tkh.com.au>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Resolution status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
Baseline - Has the WG given any thought to people who decide to turn off technologies that could be in a baseline (eg. Javascript, Flash etc) because that is their preferred way of browsing - due to their disability? Has the WG given any thought to people who use assistive technologies that cannot interpret the output of certain technologies (eg. some screen readers cannot use javascript)?

Proposed Change:

Remove the baseline theory, or allow only UAAG compliant programs in baseline.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [TEAMA] [AL] By definition, all content are as accessible as the collective sc suggest at the corresponding compliance level. People who donâ€™t want to or cannot use the technologies are indeed excluded, but not because of the disabilities covered by the success criteria. It is not the responsibility of web developer to make sure that their content would work with outdated assistive technologies. Propose to not-accept upon publication of baseline document. Discussed in the 08 February 2007 telecon: Accepted by unanimous consent. http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/02/08-wai-wcag-minutes.html {not-accept}; Resolution: The working group has debated issues such as these extensively. The concept of baseline (now "accessibility-supported content technologies") grew out those struggles. If the assistive technologies that people use do not support certain technologies, then those technologies are not accessibility-supported Web technologies. However, people turning off support for technologies because they prefer not to use them is not an accessibility issue, since people without disabilities who choose to disable certain technologies will have equal difficulty accessing the content. Your proposal is that the only technologies that can be used are those for which there exist UAAG-compliant user agents. Since there are not yet any fully UAAG-compliant user agents, this requirement would mean that there could be no WCAG-complaint content possible. And the existence of a UAAG-compliant user agent doesn't mean that users have it available to them. So requiring UAAG-compliant user agents is not a guarantee of accessibility (although WCAG would be much easier to write if it could rely on UAAG compliant user agents).; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)