[Irl-dean] AAA Claim?

[Tim Culhane]

Hi,

Personally I agree with Barry on this one.  If you upload some piece of
information to your website,  and  if that information be in  pdf, word,  an
audio file  or a graphic of some sort  (or even bog standard html),  if it
is not accessible to your users, then the accessibility of the whole website
suffers.

There is no use having a perfectly accessible  web page  telling you where
to download the  latest  manual or newsletter in pdf format, if you then
download the document only to find it is unusable.

Cheers,

Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie
[mailto:irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie] On Behalf Of Barry McMullin
Sent: 21 February 2007 09:04
To: irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
Cc: mcmullin at eeng.dcu.ie
Subject: Re: [Irl-dean] AAA Claim?




On Tue, 20 Feb 2007, brendan spillane wrote:

> It had not occurred to me that 11.1 referred to document conversion, 
> as I have always assumed this was covered by 11.3. While I would agree 
> that it is a good thing to use W3C technologies 'when they are 
> available and appropriate', currently (to my knowledge) there is no 
> W3C technology which has the same properties as pdf/doc regarding 
> printability / portability, and offline readability (as previously 
> discussed in the list)

Hi Brendan -

Many thanks for that clarification - it was certainly helpful.

I absolutely agree that PDF, in particular, has certain definite advantages
over (X)HTML+CSS for certain use cases, especially printing.  Indeed, I
advocate and use PDF frequently for that very reason.

Conversely, for general "electronic" rendering (whether on-screen, braille,
speech etc.) (X)HTML+CSS is clearly "available and appropriate", and, if it
is properly used, actually preferable to PDF or MS-Word.

So I would never want to present this as a question of *either* PDF *or*
(X)HTML+CSS.  They each have their role and, in many cases (particularly for
longer documents) providing both would be my preferred option (and, as
Brendan notes, providing multiple alternative formats is specifically
endorsed by checkpoint 11.3, albeit at priority 3).

That all said, in my opinion at least, the fact that PDF (or MS-Word etc.)
might be preferred for *some* use cases does not, in itself, mean that there
should be some sort of "blanket exemption" from checkpoint 11.1.  So I would
never consider that a resource presented *exclusively* in PDF or MS-Word
format could be considered as satisfying checkpoint 11.1, just because that
format works better than any W3C technology for printing (or "portability"
or whatever).  And, just to be clear, I do not consider this as some kind of
"technicality" or "mere compliance"
issue: it generally has direct and very tangible effects on accessibility
for users with a wide variety of disabilities; or, to put it another way, I
think it is absolutely proper and appropriate that it should apply here at
priority 2.

So I would say there is an important asymmetry here: a resource that is
provided exclusively in XHTML+CSS can meet 11.1 (and thus possibly meet
Double-A conformance); but, arguably, and depending on the context, might
not meet 11.3 (and thus might still fail Triple-A conformance).  But a
resource provided exclusively in PDF or MS-Word format will not even meet
11.1 (and thus fail Double-A conformance, quite independently of 11.3).

But, it's getting lonely up here on the soapbox. I'm not a W3C spokesman.
I'm not even a member of the WCAG working group. I'm just one person trying
to make sense of what WCAG 1.0, as written, actually means. So I'd be very
pleased to hear others comment just on this one specific question of whether
PDF and MS-Word resources should be exempt from the application of
checkpoint 11.1 (or, for that matter, any other potentially relevant
checkpoints).

(I know that I've still left Brendan's original question - of the
*scoping* of WCAG conformance claims - hanging; and I would still like to
get back to it ... sometime ...)

Thanks - Barry.

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