This informative appendix summarizes the principal goals and structure of
"User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [UAAG10].
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its
publication. Other documents may supersede this document. The latest status of
this document series is maintained at the W3C.
This document is not an independent W3C Proposed Recommendation but rather
an appendix to "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [UAAG10]. It is
a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C Proposed Recommendations as
reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress". This is
work in progress and does not imply endorsement by, or the consensus of, W3C
Members.
Please send comments about this document, including suggestions for
additional techniques, to the public mailing list w3c-wai-ua@w3.org; public archives are
available.
This document is part of a series of accessibility documents published by
the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C). WAI
Accessibility Guidelines are produced as part of the WAI Technical Activity. The
goals of the User Agent Accessibility
Guidelines Working Group are described in the charter.
A list of current W3C Recommendations and
other technical documents can be found at the W3C Web site.
The "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" (UAAG 1.0)
is part of a set of accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility
Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium. The WAI
Guidelines were designed to present a consistent model for Web accessibility in
which responsibilities for addressing the needs of users with disabilities are
shared (and distributed among) authors, software developers, and specification
writers.
The "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" explains what software
developers can do to improve the accessibility of mainstream browsers and
multimedia players so that people with visual, hearing, physical, cognitive,
and neurological disabilities will have improved access to the World Wide Web.
A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will
enable access through its own user interface and through other internal
facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies
(especially assistive technologies). UAAG 1.0 is not aimed at developers of
assistive technologies (e.g., screen magnifiers, screen readers, speech
recognition software, alternative keyboards, braille devices, etc.), although
these technologies will be essential to ensuring Web access for some users with
disabilities.
UAAG 1.0 is developed by the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working
Group (UAWG), whose participants include software
developers, users with disabilities, and international experts in the field of
accessibility technologies.
The other WAI Guidelines are:
- "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [WCAG10], which explains to authors
how to create accessible Web content.
- "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ATAG10], which explains to
developers how to design authoring tools that are accessible to authors with
disabilities, and that produce accessible Web content (i.e., content that
conforms to WCAG 1.0).
- "XML Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [XAG10], which explains to
developers how to design accessible formats and applications using XML.
The following scenarios show how some of the requirements "User Agent
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" benefit users with disabilities. These and
similar scenarios, as well as information about assistive technologies and
different types of disabilities, are described in "How People with Disabilities
Use the Web" [PWD-USE-WEB].
Note: UAAG 1.0 does not address all accessibility needs;
the other WAI Guidelines include complementary requirements for authors,
authoring tool developers, and specification designers.
Mr. Jones, a reporter for an on-line journal, makes extensive use of the Web
to conduct research and to publish articles. Over his twenty-year career, he
has developed repetitive stress injury (RSI) in his hands
and arms, and it has become painful for him to type. He uses a combination of
voice recognition and an alternative keyboard to prepare his articles, but he
doesn't use a mouse. One of the requirements of UAAG 1.0 is
that a conforming user agent be fully operable through the keyboard and
implement conventional keyboard programming interfaces
(APIs). Since many alternative input devices make use of
conventional keyboard APIs, this allows Mr. Jones to use an alternative
keyboard.
Ms. Martinez is taking several distance learning courses in physics. She is
deaf. She had little trouble with the curriculum until the university upgraded
their on-line courses to a multimedia approach, using an extensive collection
of audio lectures. While the audio benefitted users with blindness and
low-vision, and users with reading disabilities, Ms. Martinez required the
information in alternative formats. To make the classes more accessible, the
university provided text transcripts in addition to the audio versions of the
lectures. The university also provided text captions (using
SMIL) synchronized with the audio and video of some of the lectures.
One of the requirements of UAAG 1.0 is that a conforming
user agent display captions and other "conditional content" that authors may
have provided to improve accessibility but that is not rendered by default.
Ms. Laitinen is an accountant at an insurance company that uses Web-based
formats over a corporate intranet. She is blind. She uses a screen reader in
conjunction with a graphical desktop browser and a speech synthesizer. She uses
speech output, combined with navigation of the important links on a page, to
scan documents rapidly for important information, and has become accustomed to
listening to speech output at a speed that her co-workers cannot understand at
all.
For Ms. Laitinen it is critical that her desktop browser communicate with
available assistive technologies (screen reader, speech synthesizer).
UAAG 1.0 includes requirements related to communication (through
APIs) and to the implementation of system conventions (which
increase the likelihood of interoperability). Communication with her assistive
technology does not suffice to make her browser more accessible, however. Some
of her other needs that are addressed by UAAG 1.0
include:
- the ability to operate it through the keyboard (since a mouse is almost
useless to her);
- the ability to move focus to links and form controls (so that her assistive
technologies know "where she is looking");
- access to descriptions of images and video (since these text descriptions
can be read by her speech synthesizer);
- documentation on the accessibility features of her browser.
The twelve guidelines in this document state general principles for the
development of accessible user agents. For instance, guideline 1 reads:
Guideline 1: Support input and output device-independence.
Ensure that the user can interact with the user agent (and the content it
renders) through different input and output devices.
Each guideline regroups a related list of "checkpoints". The checkpoints are
the heart of UAAG 1.0, because they make the requirements on
which conformance is based. There are just over eighty "checkpoints", ranked
according to their importance to accessibility (priority 1 for most important,
then priority 2 and 3).
Here is one example of a checkpoint:
1.1 Full keyboard access.
(P1)
- Ensure that the user can operate through keyboard input
alone any user agent functionality available through the user interface.
Because people with disabilities may not be able to use certain input (e.g.,
pointing device) or output modes (e.g., visual, audio), the user agent must be
operable through a number of different input and output modes. Keyboard input
and text output enable device-independence in today's operating environments,
so UAAG 1.0 emphasizes support for these modes.
A checkpoint may include more than one requirement, and may also include
informative Notes that give examples or further explanation. Guideline 1
includes three checkpoints, including checkpoint 1.1.
Please note that the requirements of UAAG 1.0 are the checkpoints,
not the guidelines.
A user agent may satisfy the requirements of UAAG 1.0 in many different
ways. The checkpoints of UAAG 1.0 have therefore been
written to be independent of specific markup languages (e.g., the Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML) or Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG)) and operating systems. To assist developers in
understanding how to satisfy the requirements for specific technologies and
operating systems, the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has
published a separate document entitled "Techniques for User Agent Accessibility
Guidelines 1.0" [UAAG10-TECHS]. The
Techniques document includes references to other accessibility resources (such
as platform-specific software accessibility guidelines), examples, and
suggestions for approaches that may be part of satisfying the requirements of
UAAG 1.0.
Conformance to UAAG 1.0 means that a user agent has
satisfied a set of the document's requirements. Conformance is expected to be a
strong indicator (but not a guarantee) of the accessibility of a user
agent.
The conformance model of UAAG 1.0 has been designed to
allow different types of user agents with different input and output
capabilities to conform. At the same time, the model is designed so that:
- people reading claims can determine whether a conforming user agent is
likely to meet their accessibility needs, and
- people can compare claims about different user agents with relative
ease.
For instance, user agents with the following capabilities might both
conform:
- one user agent supports several audio, image, and video formats, and
keyboard input.
- another user agent does not support video output, but supports synthesized
speech output instead, and is entirely operable through keyboard and voice
input.
UAAG 1.0 includes requirements for conformance
claims, e.g., version information about the software components that
together satisfy the checkpoints, information about the platforms on which they
run, information about which markup languages are implemented as part of
conformance, which requirements the user agent does not satisfy, and more.
We encourage developers to use the checklist
[UAAG10-CHECKLIST] appendix to UAAG 1.0 as a tool
for evaluating user agents for conformance.
For the latest version of any
W3C specification please consult the list of
W3C Technical Reports at http://www.w3.org/TR.
- [ATAG10]
- "Authoring
Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", J. Treviranus, C.
McCathieNevile, I. Jacobs, and J. Richards, eds., 3 February 2000. This W3C
Recommendation is http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-ATAG10-20000203/.
-
[PWD-USE-WEB]
- The "How
People with Disabilities Use the Web", J. Brewer. This document
provides an introduction to use of the Web by people with disabilities. It is
not yet a formal W3C Working Draft.
-
[UAAG10-CHECKLIST]
- An appendix to this document lists all of the checkpoints, sorted by
priority. The checklist is available in either tabular
form or list
form.
-
[UAAG10-TECHS]
- "Techniques for User
Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", I. Jacobs, J. Gunderson, E.
Hansen, eds. The latest draft of the techniques document is available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/.
- [XAG10]
- "XML
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", D. Dardailler, S. Palmer, eds., 29
August 2001. This W3C Working Draft is
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xmlgl-20010829. The latest version is available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlgl.
- [UAAG10]
- "User Agent Accessibility
Guidelines 1.0", I. Jacobs, J. Gunderson, E. Hansen, eds. The latest
draft of the guidelines is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10/.
- [WCAG10]
- "Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", W. Chisholm, G. Vanderheiden,
and I. Jacobs, eds., 5 May 1999. This W3C Recommendation is
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/.