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[DRAFT] Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) Overview

Evaluation and Report Language (EARL)

The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a general-purpose language for expressing test results. Web accessibility evaluation tools can use this language as a standard to express evaluations results in a platform independent format. Web authoring tools and other applications could aggregate these results from different tools to combine manual and automatic testing in an efficient way.

Who EARL is for

EARL is primarily intended for developers of the following types of tools:

• Web accessibility evaluation tools
• Web quality assurance and validation tools
• Web authoring tools

What is the status of EARL 1.0

EARL 1.0 is currently still a draft and not yet operational. The Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) has published a requirements document for EARL 1.0. The charter of the Working Group lists the deliverables and milestones that the group is expected to accomplish.

Technical document format

The EARL 1.0 specification follows the W3C format for technical specifications which includes several sections at the beginning: links to different versions, editors, copyright, abstract, and status with the link to errata and the email address for comments. Most WAI specifications have a link at the top to the Table of Contents.

Who develops EARL

EARL technical documents are developed by the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG), which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). For more information about the Working Group, see the ERT WG page.

The W3C specification development process includes formal periods for public review. Opportunities for review and comment of WAI documents are announced on the WAI home page and WAI Interest Group mailing list. An email address for sending comments is included in the "Status of this Document" section. For more information about the development of EARL or to be added to a EARL reviewer list of people who want to get direct notification of EARL documents for review, contact the ERT WG Team Contact.

Opportunities for contributing to ERT and other WAI work are introduced in Participating in WAI.

Document Information

Version: DRAFT 13 July 2005 jzt
Editor: Shawn Lawton Henry and Shadi Abou-Zahra. Developed with the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) and the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group Working Group (ERT WG).

[Contacting WAI] Feedback welcome to wai-eo-editors@w3.org (a publicly archived list).

File (not content) last updated on $Date: 2005/07/27 09:02:14 $ by $Author: shawn $