Theme:External Standards by Reference

From TEITAC

Because of SWG-A, HFES, and other standards activities, we have more opportunities this time around to just adopt a technical standard instead of draft our own. Work on this theme might begin by each technical subcommittee identifying which external standards could be used, and comparing their language with that of 1194.

The Access Board has referred to external standards in other areas of its jurisdiction.

The discussion held 9 November 2006 identified certain needs in order to manage referral to external standards:

• distribution of the external standard to TEITAC members so they can review it, without requiring members to purchase those standards
• inclusion of the language of the external standard in the 508 or 255 regulations so that the many audiences of those regulations do not need to purchase the external standard. (This was recognized as a problem due to the length of the section(s) of the external standards needing to be referenced.)
• referring to a specific, frozen version of the standards (e.g. "ISO XXX February 2005")
• some way of managing how changes to that external standard are handled: automatically updated, ignored, or slated for review in some timeframe, etc.