[Irl-dean] Re: Accessibility of CHM Format Resources

[drice at nda.ie]

A posting made by myself to this mailing list on 9 June was made in error. 
 Apologies for this; they were draft notes.  Thanks to Barry for trying to 
make sense of my half formed sentences/thoughts. 

Please now allow me to present some (hopefully coherent) thoughts and a 
question on this format. 

I have had a number of conversations with civil and public service workers 
who are using or thinking about using what Big River call the BigRiver 
format (CHM) to provide documents to the public in an accessible way.  I 
have also spoken with Big River on this issue.  Big River's website, 
http://bigrivertv.com,  states that they can "apply International 
Accessibility Options" to content in the CHM format. (I assumes that by 
"options" they mean WCAG 1.0 or NDA IT Accessibility Guidelines v 1.1 for 
the web but perhaps they have something else in mind) .This, according to 
a telephone conversation I had with Big River, is less expensive than 
creating accessible HTML.  Intentional or not, some confusion has been 
created around this format in the public sector.  One point I made in the 
earlier posting still stands.  Public money would be better spent in 
building capacity within public sector organisations around producing 
content that is accessible to the widest demographic possible than using 
it to outsource content for conversion to a supposedly inexpensive but 
ultimately inaccessible format.  We in the public sector need to learn 
form our mistakes such as using PDF as the default format as on most civil 
service sites.  As public sector organisations become more aware of their 
obligations to provide content in an accessible format the limitations of 
PDF are becoming all too clear.  I hope a similar mistake is not made with 
the CHM format.  Henry's experiences with HP are very interesting in this 
regard. 

One point I was 'hatching' in my earlier posting, which Barry picked up 
on, is the futility of trying to assess the compliance of content in the 
CHM format with accessibility guidelines.  15 of the 16 priority 1 WCAG 
checkpoints essentially deal with how a resource can be manipulated by a 
user, through their user agent, so as to be perceived in the manner that 
best suits that user eg over-riding style sheets.  However if the user 
agent, in this instance the CHM viewer does not allow the user to do this, 
then it is indeed a "red herring" to look at the accessibility of the 
content.  I think my earlier confused scribblings to this list are a 
testament to the difficulty involved in trying to assess the CHM formats 
compliance to WCAG 1.0 or the NDA IT Accessibility Guidelines v1.1 for the 
web.  They simply do not apply. 

But what of WCAG 2.0 which seems to be much more embracing of non-W3C 
technologies?

Draft guideline 4.2 from WCAG 2.0 states "Ensure that user interfaces are 
accessible or provide an accessible alternative" and a Level 1 Success 
Criteria for this is "At least one plug-in required to access the content 
conforms to at least the default set of conformance requirements of the 
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 1.0".  Assuming for a moment 
the CHM viewer does comply with UAAG 1.0 (and at a brief glance, IMO, it 
would appear to do so) content in the CHM format could potentially conform 
to WCAG 2.0 if it conformed to the other WCAG 2.0 guidelines.  So are we 
looking at a technology that does not conform to WCAG 1.0 or the NDA IT 
Accessibility Guidelines v1.1 for the web but which could potentially 
conform to WCAG 2.0? 

Thanks to Barry for putting together this paper and for everyone’s 
comments so far.

Dónal Rice




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