Seven Notes Published by the Evaluation and Repairs Tool Working Group
The Evaluation and Repairs Tool Working Group has published seven Group Notes:
- Requirements for the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0: This document describes the requirements for the scope, design, and features of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0. EARL is a vocabulary, the terms of which are defined across a set of specifications and technical notes, and that is used to describe test results. The primary motivation for developing this vocabulary is to facilitate the exchange of test results between Web accessibility evaluation tools in a vendor-neutral and platform-independent format. It also provides reusable terms for generic quality assurance and validation purposes.
- Evaluation and Report Language 1.0 Schema describes the formal schema of the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0. The Evaluation and Report Language defines a vocabulary for expressing test results. It enables any person, software application, or organization to assert test results for any test subject tested against any set of criteria. The test subject might be a website, an authoring tool, a user agent, or some other entity. The set of criteria may be accessibility guidelines, formal grammars, or other types of quality assurance requirements. Thus, EARL is flexible with regard to the contexts in which it can be applied.
- Developer Guide for Evaluation and Report Language 1.0: This is a guide to the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0 for developers of software tools and processes. It provides an introduction to EARL and its uses, defines conformance requirements for tools supporting EARL, and describes approaches for serializing EARL data in different formats.
- Developers' Guide to Features of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: This document describes features that web authoring and quality assurance tools can incorporate, so that they support the evaluation of accessibility requirements, such as those defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The main purpose of this document is to promote awareness of such tool features and to provide introductory guidance for tool developers on what kind of features they could provide in future implementations of their tools.
- HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0: The identification of resources on the Web by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) alone may not be sufficient, as other factors such as HTTP content negotiation might come into play. This issue is particularly significant for quality assurance testing, conformance claims, and reporting languages like the W3C Evaluation And Report Language (EARL). It provides a representation of the HTTP vocabulary in the Resource Description Framework (RDF), to allow quality assurance tools to record the HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server. The RDF terms defined by this document represent the core HTTP specification defined by RFC 2616, as well as additional HTTP headers registered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). These terms can also be used to record HTTPS exchanges.
- Representing Content in RDF 1.0: This document is a specification for a vocabulary to represent content in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This vocabulary is intended to provide a flexible framework within different usage scenarios to semantically represent any type of content, be it on the Web or in local storage media. For example, it can be used by web quality assurance tools such as web accessibility evaluation tools to record a representation of the assessed web content, including text, images, or other types of formats. In many cases, it can be used together with HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0, which allows quality assurance tools to record the HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server. This is particularly useful for quality assurance testing, conformance claims, and reporting languages like the W3C Evaluation And Report Language.
- Pointer Methods in RDF 1.0: This specification contains a framework for representing pointers - entities that permit identifying a portion or segment of a piece of content - making use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). It also describes a number of specific types of pointers that permit portions of a document to be referred to in different ways. When referring to a specific part of, say, a piece of web content, it is useful to be able to have a consistent manner by which to refer to a particular segment of a web document, to have a variety of ways by which to refer to that same segment, and to make the reference robust in the face of changes to that document. This specification is part of the Evaluation And Report Language (EARL) but can be reused in other contexts too.