Feedback mechanism available

supplemental

Normative Text

A mechanism is available to provide feedback to authors.

Tests

This section is non-normative.

Procedure

Within the conformance scope:

Check that a feedback mechanism exists.
Check that the feedback is sent to authors.

Expected results

#1 and #2 are true.

Tests

This content needs to be written.

Key Terms

actively available

available for the user to perceive and use

assistive technology

hardware and/or software that acts as a user agent, or along with a mainstream user agent, to provide functionality to meet the requirements of users with disabilities that go beyond those offered by mainstream user agents

Functionality provided by assistive technology includes alternative presentations (e.g., as synthesized speech or magnified content), alternative input methods (e.g., voice), additional navigation or orientation mechanisms, and content transformations (e.g., to make tables more accessible).

Assistive technologies often communicate data and messages with mainstream user agents by using and monitoring APIs.

The distinction between mainstream user agents and assistive technologies is not absolute. Many mainstream user agents provide some features to assist individuals with disabilities. The basic difference is that mainstream user agents target broad and diverse audiences that usually include people with and without disabilities. Assistive technologies target narrowly defined populations of users with specific disabilities. The assistance provided by an assistive technology is more specific and appropriate to the needs of its target users. The mainstream user agent may provide important functionality to assistive technologies like retrieving web content from program objects or parsing markup into identifiable bundles.

Assistive technologies that are important in the context of this document include the following:

screen magnifiers, and other visual reading assistants, which are used by people with visual, perceptual and physical print disabilities to change text font, size, spacing, color, synchronization with speech, etc. in order to improve the visual readability of rendered text and images;
screen readers, which are used by people who are blind to read textual information through synthesized speech or braille;
text-to-speech software, which is used by some people with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities to convert text into synthetic speech;
speech recognition software, which may be used by people who have some physical disabilities;
alternative keyboards, which are used by people with certain physical disabilities to simulate the keyboard (including alternate keyboards that use head pointers, single switches, sip/puff and other special input devices.);
alternative pointing devices, which are used by people with certain physical disabilities to simulate mouse pointing and button activations.

conformance scope

A set of Views and/or Pages selected to be part of a conformance claim. Where a View or Page is part of a Process, all the Views or Pages in the process must be included.

How a person or organization selects the set is not defined in WCAG3. There maybe informative guidance on selecting a suitable set in future (similar to WCAG-EM), but regional laws or regulations may provide a methodology.

content

information, sensory experience and interactions conveyed

mechanism

process or technique for achieving a result

The mechanism may be explicitly provided in the content, or may be relied upon to be provided by either the platform or by user agents, including assistive technologies.

The mechanism needs to meet all requirements for the conformance level claimed.

page

non-embedded resource obtained from a single URI using HTTP plus any other resources that are used in the rendering or intended to be rendered together

Where a URI is available and represents a unique set of content, that would be the preferred conformance unit.

platform

software, or collection of layers of software, that lies below the subject software and provides services to the subject software and that allows the subject software to be isolated from the hardware, drivers, and other software below

Platform software both makes it easier for subject software to run on different hardware, and provides the subject software with many services (e.g. functions, utilities, libraries) that make the subject software easier to write, keep updated, and work more uniformly with other subject software.

A particular software component might play the role of a platform in some situations and a client in others. For example a browser is a platform for the content of the page but it also relies on the operating system below it.

The platform is the context in which the conformance scope exists.

process

series of views or pages associated with user actions, where actions required to complete an activity are performed, often in a certain order, regardless of the technologies used or whether it spans different sites or domains

user agent

any software that retrieves and presents web content for users

view

content that is actively available in a viewport including that which can be scrolled or panned to, and any additional content that is included by expansion while leaving the rest of the content in the viewport actively available

A modal dialog box would constitute a new view because the other content in the viewport is no longer actively available.

viewport

object in which the platform presents content

The author has no control of the viewport and almost always has no idea what is presented in a viewport (e.g. what is on screen) because it is provided by the platform. On browsers the hardware platform is isolated from the content.

Content can be presented through one or more viewports. Viewports include windows, frames, loudspeakers, and virtual magnifying glasses. A viewport may contain another viewport. For example, nested frames. Interface components created by the user agent such as prompts, menus, and alerts are not viewports.