Edit comment LC-1215 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-1215: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Al Gilman <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org>; 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:
Some wiggle room is attempted in the statement of the individual success criteria, but the general process for arriving at a conformance claim satisfaction is still, as in WCAG, a "one strike and you're out" rule.

Another way to describe it is that there is an "AND" combination of single point test results to get the overall score.

This is a serious problem.

This kind of rollup or score-keeping is seriously out of alignment with the general reduntant quality of natural communication including web content.

In natural communication there is often more than one way to learn what there is to learn from an utterance.

And in GUIs there is often more than one way to effect any given outcome.

So long as there is a go-path and the user can find it, a noGo-path should not force a failing grade for the [subject of conformance claim]

There is prior art in Mean Time Between Failures computations in reliability engineering, in the handling of redundant fallback capability.

Proposed Change:

An approach to consider:

Make the assessment of overall score or rating incorporate the recognition of alternatives at all levels of aggregation and not just at the leaf level. In other words, take systematic account of equivalent facilitation.

If there is an accessible way to learn or do what there is to learn or do, and an accessible way to find this when other paths prove problematic, that content should not fail as a result of the problems with the alternate path. It is not enough to address this in 1.1.1 and 4.2. It needs to be global.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [TEAMA] Discussed in the 05 April 2007 telecon: Resolution: Accept as ammended http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/04/05-wai-wcag-minutes.html {not accept}; Resolution: While we think there is promise in using a different strategies than Web page for providing alternative content, we were unable to develop an approach that permitted this flexibility without introducing other problems and loopholes. We recommend that this be investigated for future versions of the guidelines.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)