Comments and responses on CEN/BT WG 185 analysis of conformance schemes for accessibility. This web page is used for publishing responses to comments and questions regarding the CEN/BT WG 185 analysis on testing and conformance schemes of products and services meeting accessibility requirements.
Any stakeholder is welcome to send comments, contributions and questions to the project team assigned to provide the analysis, by using the e-mail address m376conformance@verva.se. The project team will consider the submitted issue and decide how to deal with it. The response on how the issue will be dealt with, and the resulting impact on the output delivered from the team, will be published on this webpage together with the source and date of the issue. The webpage will be reviewed regularly by the BT WG who will be the final arbiter of any conflicts about the resolution of an issue or its entry into the register.
More than 192 comments where received on the May Final Draft Version of the document. They where addressed by the Project Team in the Final Report (currently for approval in Nice, october 8th 2008. This document can be downloaded from the reports page.
Several contributors. From January to March 2008. Several members of the BTWG have made comments on the content of the first draft report (released in December 2007).
BTWG185 Project Team response, 13 March 2007.
These comments have been taken into account when preparing the interim technical
report. They are discussed in the collation of commentsl. This document can be
downloaded from the
reports page.
ANEC and EDF have published a joint position paper on e-accessibility.
Alex Li, SAP and James Thurston, Microsoft, has informed of a new report by the IDC on conformance and accessibility
It would be really useful to be able to track new comments using an RSS feed, I hope it will be possible to provide this.
BTWG185 Project Team response, 14 Nov 2007
At present, Verva does not provide RSS-services other than from its news page.
Visitors to Verva's web site have not expressed any demand for RSS-services. However,
Verva recognizes the usefulness of RSS both for the M376-page and for some other pages,
and will consider the proposal.
A document which adresses the PT work directly, "ICT accessibility standardization and its use in policy measures". The document is available at http://www.ictsb.org/DATSCG_home.htm.
The Project Team expresses its thanks to Massimo Canducci for the possibility to contact him about the italian law on accessibility, requirements set and application modality.
“In my eyes accessibility is usability for users with handicaps. Thats why I want to propose to use the ISO 9241-11 & -10 as one basis for conformance schemes for accessibility.”
BTWG185 Project Team response, 6 Nov 2007
The issue of using ISO 9241-10 and -11 for accessibility requirements gives rise
to (at least) two important questions which need to be further discussed in Phase 1
and 2:
a) If accessibility is defined in terms of usability, such as in ISO 9241-171 on software accessibility, the accessibility is not an intrinsic characteristic of a product. Instead, it is dependent on the context of use, including the users. This makes it difficult to use in a procurement for a whole organisation, since there may be many different contexts of use. However, we might introduce two levels of accessibility:
b) One of the elements of usability is satisfaction. Satisfaction can be measured on objective or (more likely) subjective grounds. Subjectivity seem to be in contradiction to transparency and predictability, which are principles that must be taken into account in public procurement. How is it possible to handle subjectivity in the evaluation of tenders and still consider transparency and treat tenders equally?
You may want to look into the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM), which is not
a conformity assessment scheme, but it can support it. See:
<http://wabcluster.org/>
BTWG185 Project Team response, 6 Nov 2007
Thank you. The Project team is well aware of the UWEM, since a member of the team,
Eric Velleman, is the coordinator of the Wab Cluster.