Auto-WCAG meets on Standardization question [via Automated WCAG Monitoring Community Group]

With close to 20 participants, yesterday's Auto-WCAG meeting was the biggest one
so far. The topic of the meeting: Should there be a standardized accessibility
rules? The answer according to most participants: Yes, there should be. Together
with W3C's Judy Brewer and Shadi Abou-Zahra we have started to explore the
possibilities to further harmonize and standardize rules for accessibility
conformance testing. Something many participants of yesterday's meeting iterated
would be very helpful to them.

As it stands today, conformance testing for accessibility is a challenge for
many organizations. Figuring out if your web content meets the accessibility
standard is trickier than it may sound. The WCAG 2.0 standard is extremely
useful in outlining the accessibility problems people with disabilities face.
However, what it does not do is provide instructions on how to consistently test
for such problems. This is where accessibility rule sets come in. Unlike WCAG
success criteria, which are high level and technology independent, accessibility
rules would be designed to reliably identify accessibility issues in specific
technologies.

A major advantage gained from such rules is that many can be entirely automated.
This makes them ideal for continuous integration testing. Automated testing is
simply faster and resolving issues found this way is more cost effective. Then
there is the problem of accuracy. If a rule incorrectly identifies an error (for
example, because there is an alternative it could not detect), this can
significantly frustrate the development process.

Many such rule sets currently exist, but those rules often disagree with each
other for a variety of reasons, such as differing views on accessibility and
overlooking creative solutions to accessibility problems. Our hope is that the
accessibility community can pull together on this question, so we can better
integrate our work into common practices of web development and feel confident
about having done so.



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'Auto-WCAG meets on Standardization question'

https://www.w3.org/community/auto-wcag/2016/03/18/auto-wcag-meets-on-standardization-question/



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Received on Friday, 18 March 2016 10:47:52 UTC