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Re: A clear EU accessibility law proposed? At what cost?

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From: Ramón Corominas
Date: Dec 22, 2012 11:50AM

Since WCAG 2.0 does not define what technology must be used, and
according to the definition you have mentioned:

- Any downloadable PDF will necessarily have a single URI
- HTTP is usually the protocol used to provide PDF files
- PDF documents are intended to be rendered by a user agent

Unless you are considering the strict definition of user agent:

"any software that retrieves and presents Web content for users"

And therefore you could argue that an offline PDF reader is not a user
agent, since it does not "retrieve" web content. But following that
argument screen readers would not be user agents, since they don't
retrieve anything, they simply read what is retrieved by a browser.

Regards,
Ramón.

Duff wrote:

> As I read it, WCAG 2.0 covers "web pages" as normatively defined here:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#webpagedef
>
> The Conformance section also make it very clear that "Conformance is defined only for web pages."
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#conformance-claims
>
> So far as I can tell, WCAG 2.0 intends to cover content that's delivered to the user within a browser. I guess the interesting question is: does WCAG 2.0 cover content that doesn't need a browser?
>
>> If not, it would be trivial to force PDF files to
>> always download (for example, with an HTTP header "content-disposition:
>> attachment") and thus bypass the need for accessibility.
>
>
> That's an interesting case. HTTP is still the "protocol of delivery," of course, so purists might argue that real evasion of WCAG 2.0 would require use of an FTP server. ;-)
>
> Duff.