Thread Subject: Re: action item from 02/28/2007proposalforuser-agent and authoring web/software requirements

Note

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From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Wed, Mar 07 2007 2:25 PM

I believe this is an excellent modification, as I have no problem with
the functionality being provided by 3rd party solutions.

Thanks for the modification, the more brains we use the better our
recommendations may be!





Allen Hoffman -- 202-447-0303

-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Dana
Simberkoff
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 3:48 PM
To: TEITAC Web/Software Subcommittee
Cc: Peterson, Bill
Subject: Re: [teitac-websoftware] action item from 02/28/2007
proposalforuser-agent and authoring web/software requirements

All-

Apologies for missing the call today. Is the proposal here that
authoring tools themselves would be required to provide test and repair
capabilities within them? This would seem counter-intuitive as some
quality assurance should be (and maybe must be) done by the use of
third-party tool that provides the same function. Certainly testing
needs to be done as part of the full life cycle of the development
process but it is important to recognize that testing needs to be done
possibly on the source as well as the presentation layer or user
interface of an application.

Therefore my proposal for alternative language or a modification would
be:

When software allows creation of, or modification to information stored
in a specific set of encoding formats, all accessibility attributes
contained in those formats must be available to the author, and
programmatic assessment and remediation of those attributes must be
provided to expedite such creation or modification. This feature can be
built in or available through a third party solution.

Thanks for your feedback.

Dana Louise Simberkoff
HiSoftware Company
603-578-1870 x11




-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of
Hoffman, Allen
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 1:19 PM
To: TEITAC Web/Software Subcommittee
Cc: Peterson, Bill
Subject: [teitac-websoftware] action item from 02/28/2007 proposal
foruser-agent and authoring web/software requirements

As a follow up to the 02/28/2007 web/software meeting here are proposals
for potential single requirement additions for user-agent and authoring
tools. These essentially go hand-in-hand with content, web and software
requirements to ensure end-to-end accessibility is actually produced.

Problem:

No matter what electronic encoding method is used to represent
information, it is the responsibility of an author to create the
content, or programmatically generate it via previously defined
instructions, and the responsibility of some other program to take this
input and provide some kind of presentation of the information for the
end-user. This is an oversimplification of the process, but essentially
there is an encoding phase which relies upon the "authoring tool", which
is tied generally to some encoding format, for example HTML authoring
tools encode HTML, etc. Once encoded, the format must be parsed and the
information presented by the "user-agent", for example Internet
Explorer, or Microsoft PowerPoint for .ppt format. currently Section
508 only defines content (format specific) requirements for HTML, but a
proposal has been made to define a minimum set of format requirements
for the format to be considered accessible. This is based upon the
concept that without a representation method for certain sets of
information, a format can not achieve accessibility.

Discussion:

Previous discussion brings us to the general consensus (maybe), that we
don't want to produce numerous requirements for various specialized
kinds of software, for example several requirements for authoring-tools
and several more for user-agents. We still need requirements for such
tools so this proposal will try and wrap them into a single unit for
consideration. Note, W3c has user-agent and authoring guidelines now,
but these are geared to web primarily, not content as a broader set. If
ISO HFES or others have such equivalent guidelines it would be helpful
to get a clear understand of those that are out there.

But... here we go with a proposal.

Authoring-tool:

When software allows creation of, or modification to information stored
in a specific set of encoding formats, all accessibility attributes
contained in those formats must be available to the author, and
programmatic assessment and remediation of those attributes must be
provided to expedite such creation or modification.

note: Distinction may be needed for software (or web-based software),
which is not operated by humans, but I'm not fully prepared with that
language at this date.

User-agent:

When software is used to interpret information for presentation to an
end-user from a specific set of encoding formats, accessibility
attributes from those formats must be used to ensure that the
interpreted content is displayed to allow assistive technologies to use
the encoded accessibility attributes for end-user presentation.

Note: If that isn't broad enough we're probably in trouble. We also
should say that other software requirements are applicable, but that may
just be redundant.


We could include the spell checking and word look up features in
authoring and user-agent tool requirements here if it is a consensus to
do so.

There are some additional points:

Should formats just be considered here, or only formats that meet the
minimum accessibility criteria previously proposed? If a range of
accessibility attributes is available should we say that the maximum set
of accessibility attributes shall be interpreted .... Or, just leave
this alone and say for all formats....?

Allen Hoffman
DHS Office on Accessible systems & Technology
v: 202-447-0303

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