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Edit comment LC-490 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-490
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Commenter: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>

or
Resolution status:

Part of Item:
Comment Type: TE
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):

The expression "conveyed through presentation" is not defined, and therefore open to divergent interpretations. If, for example, an implementor decided that "presentation" could be construed as meaning "auditory presentation provided by a speech-enabled user agent", and it turned out that very few aspects of the structure of the content were conveyed in an auditory presentation, then it could be concluded, contrary to the purpose of the guidelines, that almost none of the structure need be programmatically determinable. I can think of two alternative ways in which the concept of "conveyed through presentation" could be more precisely defined.

1. Any aspect of the information or structure that is evident from the presentation of the content, in any modality, must be able to be programmatically determined.

2. Any aspect of the information or structure for which the author provides presentational hints to the user agent, must be able to be programmatically determined. Presentational hints may include style parameters, visual formatting (layout, font changes, etc.), audio formatting (parameters to control a speech synthesizer) and other aspects of the content designed to influence its presentation in one or more sensory modalities. I think the second proposal is the more practicable solution as it doesn't leave authors wondering what might be apparent in a presentational context with which they are unfamiliar, that needs to be made programmatically determinable.

Proposed Change:

Rewrite the success criterion, add a note to it, or rewrite the definition of "presentation" to clarify the requirement in accordance with the problem raised and the solutions suggested above, or indeed any other solution that addresses the lack of clarity in the current text.
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