Conformance Proposal Based on Profiling

Gregg Vanderheiden 3/28/2003

This conformance scheme is based on there being three levels of implementation.

Level 1 are those things needed for AT compatibility that do not, in general, affect the appearance of the page for individuals without disability and which are judged to be doable on essentially all pages and content.

Level 2 are those items which would be visible to individuals without disabilities in viewing the page and which are designed to allow the pages to be more accessible to individuals using standard web browsers without any AT.

Level 3 are items which would qualify under Level 1 or 2, except that they are more than what could be applied reasonably to all pages and content. Therefore, these items are things that could be done by individuals or sites wishing to make their pages very accessible to particular individuals or groups. In some case, it would actually require the content to be rendered in multiple forms in order to address multiple user groups (including people without disabilities).

Conformance Scheme

The conformance scheme would allow individual entities or countries to create their own “profiles” for determining accessibility. In fact, they could create their own “Priority 1 Profile”, “Priority 2 Profile”, etc.

All of the profiles would have all of the items in level 1 as being required. That is, the level 1 items would be required in any of the profiles. The profiles could then choose any items from level 2 or 3, but they would need to use the items intact and without change. That is, all profiles would be proper subsets of the entire level 1 + level 2 + level 3 set and would completely contain the level 1 set.

This approach allows countries or entities to each create their own profile for their individual needs. If particular guidelines were seen as being more important for particular entities, they could be chosen from a level 3 and put into that entity's priority 1 profile. If there was a particular time (from level 2 or level 3) which was difficult or impossible for them, it could be excluded from their priority 1, priority 2, or priority 3, etc. profiles. (But, level 1 items could not be excluded.)

Authors wanting to conform to these different standards might have a situation where different countries or entities who would have different subsets of the whole. However, the authors would never have a problem with conflicting standards. All of the standards would be proper subsets of the whole and thus conforming with standard would never interfere with conforming with any other. At most, they would simply have to conform to a subset of the whole, which was the sum (or union) of a number of different entities' standards.

Similarly, testing and testing tools would be more straightforward. A tool which could test for the full set should be able to test for any subset.

Caveats

1. This model requires that the level 1 set of requirements not contain anything which the adopting entities would find either impossible or so aversive that they could not include it in their minimum priority 1 set.
2. As nice as this sounds on a theoretical basis, until the items are, in fact, all developed, one cannot be sure that there are not any interaction effects whereby selecting some subset of the whole would actually cause a problem. That is, to work smoothly, each of the items would have to be either completely independent or benignly interdependent.

It does, however, allow for countries to more or less emphasis on any particular guidelines while still working together with all other countries to create a unified superset so that page authors only have one overall set of guidelines to consider, understand, test against, and comply with (even though particular entities may only require compliance or conformance with different subsets of the whole).