| EOWG

WAI Gallery -- Planning

Goal | Approach | Who's Interested | Review | Background | Cautions

Last updated 23 August 2002 by Judy Brewer (jbrewer @w3.org)

NOTE! Some content on this page has been updated with information from the EOWG meeting on 29-30 July 2002.  Remainder of content is from 20 January 2000 (in other words, old). Comments to wai-eo-editors @w3.org

Goal

To develop a showcase of Web sites, implementing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 at a Double-A Conformance level, that includes a variety of different types of Web sites, different complexity of design, and represents accessible Web sites in a variety of countries and languages; without inadvertently endorsing inaccessible sites.

Approach

[Note: this section is old. For new info, see 'proceed with caution' section below.] Please read through the companion page to this, "Review of Web Site Accessibility -- Planning" [including July 2002 updates] before reading this part.

We should probably develop this in a multi-stage process, so that we can get something available soon. One way to do it would be to:

1. Put out a call for nominations to the WAI Interest Group; establish and recruit people onto the (soon to be created) wai-review@w3.org list to do an informal review & discussion, in public space, of the sites that have initially been nominated; and then identify a small team of around five experienced reviewers do a final pass over the sites that make it through the wai-review@w3.org discussion. They could then select a diverse spread of ten to twenty different sites. The sites could be mounted in "WAI Gallery" space under W3C/WAI, and we'd attach a disclaimer saying that these had undergone only informal review so far and that we'll be updating the gallery and making it more formal over time.
2. The second stage could be updating and expanding the gallery with sites nominated from the Review Teams, and with sites that have been submitted directly to a contact point on the WAI Gallery and then vetted through one or more Review Teams. We'd want to end up with a gallery that shows different types of sites -- e-commerce, portals, reference, simple home pages, etc. -- with everything from sophisticated flashy design to very basic design; and that shows sites from different countries and in different languages. There'd need to be some kind of communication with Web masters whose sites were going into the gallery; and disclaimers about the sites changing during the period when they were in the gallery.
3. Third stage could be rotating sites in and out of the gallery over time, to ensure an on-going incentive of potential "showcase" exposure for new sites; and archiving the older sites with whatever notes might be appropriate. We might want to consider archiving them with frozen "snapshots" in case their accessibility level changes over time.
4. An on-going parallel activity could be enabling a feedback mechanism, so anyone viewing the gallery could provide feedback on how the sites in the gallery worked for them. This feedback would be useful to the Web Content Guidelines Working Group, to help identify barriers that WCAG may not have addressed adequately; and the feedback would also be useful for the Evaluation and Repair Tools Interest Group as it considers requirements for new and better assessment tools, since it could help identify WCAG checkpoint non-conformance that isn't being caught by existing evaluation tools and strategies.

Who's Interested So Far...

[Note: old material, see next section] There will be some overlap here with the people listed as interested in the Review Teams on the companion page to this, however we may get other organizations involved as well. 

Cautionary Approaches

• reader has to wade through disclaimers before reaching gallery
• reader has to actively acknowledge the disclaimer
• disclaimers and associated policies relating to the gallery are pre-negotiated with organization's rep
• [controversial] say something about what's being highlighted on a site
• every site would have to be re-evaluated any time there is ANY change
• set up an automatic eval 3x/day
• hourly checks! take advantage of those automated tools
• [no agreement] link to gallery at another organization that holds the responsibility
• use the rotation concept with a history of previous to avoid anti-competitive accusations within a given industry sector
• require that sites also have pics or ncsa? ratings that ensure that the content is palatable
• shift the responsibility to the featured site -- have them have an intro page for accessibility, describing their goals & policies, specifically their participation in the gallery & their commitment
• ensure human checks as well -- rigorous ones! to make sure that things have not changed too much....
• [controversial] gallery of home pages only, no depth of layers
• [controversial] go back to the concept of cached pages only
• only list sites that have a real live person behind the contact
• confidentiality on the part of the reviewers -- if we are doing this by category.. keeping the names of the reviewers confidential...
• require versioning control variation... history of versioning
• come up with a clear published standard for selection, and/or a 'no obligation to include your site' policy
• have a disclaimer that these sites are not necessarily the best for usability, etc,. clarify that are pointing to them for accessibility but not for usability.

sample framework, integrating some of these approaches (proposal, no consensus)

1. Gallery must be entered through a disclaimer statement which the user must acknowledge (accessibly!), and which includes:
• notice that W3C does not endorse the organization, only provides this as a design example
• notice that W3C cannot guarantee the accessibility of the site, and assumes no liability for any accessibility failures
• notice that W3C is not obligated to include any given nominated site, regardless of its accessibility level, nor to maintain a site in the gallery indefinitely
• notice that W3C attempts to show a diversity of sites, and that those may from time to time include only one, or more than one, site from within a given industry sector
• notice that the sites chosen are chosen to demonstrate implementation of WCAG 1.0, and inclusion in the Gallery is not an indication of their status with regard to other design criteria, such as usability, etc.
• notice that a site not being listed does not mean that it is not WCAG 1.0 conformant (W3C/WAI has limited resources to review; sites are chosen to demonstrate different features, etc.)
  
2. Sites are only included in Gallery which meet the following criteria:
• have been initially reviewed by two teams, meeting WAI's description of review team, and whose names and/or organizations remain confidential
• meet at least a WCAG 1.0 Level AA according to the "Evaluating Web Sites" conformance assessment method, one layer deep under the home page of the site [?discuss?]
• have an established agreement with W3C/WAI to notify W3C/WAI if there are any design changes during the time the site is posted in the Gallery
  
• have installed an icon or code on their site which facilitates automatic monitoring
• can be monitored on a continual basis by W3C/WAI for changes in accessibility status
• can be comprehensively re-evaluated by a review team on a monthly? basis, for a period of no longer than (6 months maximum stay in gallery?)
  
3. Sites which are nominated but not selected
• their names are not revealed
4. Sites which have been previously included in the Gallery
• are no longer listed, even historically, once removed [? discuss]