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Re: Evaluating accessibility level for managers

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 22, 2006 1:10AM

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Stephane Deschamps wrote:

> We're having a problem with how accessibility level is conveyed to managers.

Reality check: Most managers don't know what accessibility is. Discussing
"levels" with them is not constructive.

> We've tested a site lately, and it conforms to 39% to A and 48% to A+AA.
> So, seen from a manager's point of view, it seems that they're better at
> AA than at A.

>From a normal manager's point of view, that says nothing. Unfortunately,
not all managers admit their ignorance of what accessibility levels are.

> Which could be a problem, because they may eventually be more careful
> about some AA criteria which are perhaps more spectacular than basic but
> necessary A criteria.

Perhaps. So why would you tell them anything about A, AA, or AAA, or
percentages?

> We've tried doing some perequation, like A+AA is computed in such a way
> that A criteria weigh twice as much as AA criteria for instance,

That's pointless arithmetics.

> How do you people convey the idea that A is more
> important than AA, and samely that AA is more important than AAA?

That's inherent in the "levels". Either you know that, or you don't.
Either you agree with the idea, or you don't.

If your site conforms to 39% to A and 48% to A+AA, then I would say - even
with strong criticism on the usefulness of the criteria and their
classification - that the site has very poor accessibility. Why would you
want to misrepresent this? The real measure, however, is how common and
how serious the violations are. For example, is there a single page that
exhibits very many inaccessabilities, or do the poor percentages really
reflect the overall quality of pages of the site?

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/