Edit comment LC-646 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-646: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Matthew Magain <matt@opinios.com> on behalf of none; 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:
Part of Item:
Comment Type: GE
Comment (including rationale for proposed change):

I disagree strongly with the concept of having a baseline. By NOT specifying a minimum technology set of HTML, then site owners are essentially given free range over choosing to only support the technology that they want, regardless of whether any accessible user agent for rendering that technology is in existence. This goes against the grain of the W3C\'s underlying philosophy of making Web content available to anyone. If the W3C want WCAG to be future-proofed, it should encompass existing technologies, and evolve with version 3.0 when new technologies become in use, not pre-empt them through by being ambiguous.

Proposed Change:

That WCAG 2.0 specify HTML as a minimum technology for making information accessible. That existing technologies be incorporated into WCAG using specific guidelines for current user agents.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [TEAMA] Discussed in the 19 April 2007 telecon: resolution to close 530 as ammended (includes Issue 531, Issue 588, Issue 646, Issue 807, Issue 889, Issue 951, Issue 997, Issue 998, Issue 1030, and Issue 1494) http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/04/19-wai-wcag-minutes.html {partial accept}; Resolution: The conformance section of WCAG2 has been completely rewritten. The term "baseline" has been replaced by "accessibility-supported Web technologies". The issue of what it means to be an accessibility-supported Web technology is addressed in the section "Accessibility Support of Web Technologies" at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/#accessibility-support . WCAG 2.0 is technology neutral, so it would be inappropriate to require any specific technology, such as HTML. (We would, nevertheless, be surprised to find environments that did not consider HTML to be accessibility supported).; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)