Re: UNS: Re: WCAG considering amending F65 to NOT fail missing ALT text if title or aria-label is present

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for writing the post, I see the Jared Smith from WebAIM has
commented, and I consider he has provided some useful feedback that we
should consider:

Jared Smith <http://webaim.org/>November 26, 2013 at 2:24
AM<http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/11/image-alt-exception-change-re-re-re.html?showComment=1385450686463#c8964124963439827855>
>
> First, I'm curious how we got to this point. Why has nobody considered the
> implications and harmonization of years-old W3C specifications (two of
> which are accessibility-specific) that prescribed techniques that directly
> resulted in a WCAG failure until now? That the working group is seemingly
> caught off guard and in argument over this is a bit alarming.
>
> Second, to partially answer that question, it seems that recent updates to
> WCAG techniques documents simply reflect the current state of AT support,
> rather than best practice and requirements for optimal accessibility. WCAG
> is simply becoming a codification of "what works today" versus
> "recommendations for making Web content more accessible" (sentence one of
> the WCAG 2.0 document).
>
> This leaves innovators of ARIA, HTML5, and tomorrow's technologies in a
> state of confusion regarding WCAG conformance until the working group deems
> that we've crossed some nebulous threshold of support and thus modifies
> failures to reflect this. But this doesn't happen until AFTER it's widely
> in use and, by definition, already supporting accessibility. This means a
> site that has zero accessibility issues due to modern (or not so modern)
> technology can fail WCAG today, then pass tomorrow based on a
> failure/techniques definition change. If WCAG is truly about
> recommendations and guidelines, it needs to be more forward looking than
> this.
>
> In short, WCAG is increasingly skating to where the puck is, not to where
> it will or should be.
>
> And this bring me to my third point, the working group needs to at last
> determine whether a failure as defined in techniques documents absolutely
> results in a failure at the normative WCAG level. I've asked several
> working group members this question and received varying responses ranging
> from "A page can have many failures, yet still be conformant if it meets
> the normative success criteria in other ways." to (as expressed just today
> by a former WCAG editor) "FAILUREs are things that are ALWAYs failures."
> So, which is it? Until this question is resolved, one cannot know the
> implications of modifying (or not) any failure language.
>
> And finally, regarding the F65 change itself... at this point, it's mostly
> irrelevant. My preference would be no or little change. But this is just
> one of many places in which ARIA and HTML5 techniques conflict with WCAG
> techniques and failures. Modern, dynamic web accessibility, I believe, can
> no longer be defined in such simplistic ways - by drawing a
> techniques/failures line in the sand, so to speak. End user accessibility
> just doesn't work that way. WebAIM's recommendations will not change -
> "Make things accessible to your users in the technologies they use, using
> HTML first, then ARIA, etc. to enhance and support that accessibility when
> necessary." If followed, and if the page meets the normative WCAG success
> criteria, whether the page matches increasingly complex and conflated WCAG
> techniques and failures doesn't really matter.
>


--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>


On 25 November 2013 16:22, Adrian Roselli <Roselli@algonquinstudios.com>wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Janina Sajka [mailto:janina@rednote.net]
> [...]
> > Frankly, I'm unclear why you even took this discussion to Twitter. What
> did
> > you expect to gain and how are we to understand the value of any results?
> > What good does this do? What value does it add?
>
> I'd like to note that I wrote an overview on my blog yesterday [1] and
> also solicited feedback from the community.
>
> I don't consider this to be random voting, nor do I expect the respondents
> have all the context. I also know that my followers (all 2 of them) hold a
> similar view as I do, so I don't expect to hear a viewpoint different from
> my own.
>
> I do, however, hope to discover some nuggets (for either viewpoint) that
> maybe I had not considered that I can bring back here for discussion. I
> don't think lack of membership here precludes having a voice, though I do
> see the value in having somebody collecting that information to present
> back here.
>
> And for the record, I am against loosening alt attribute restrictions, as
> I was against it the last time it came around for discussion.
>
>
>
> 1.
> http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/11/image-alt-exception-change-re-re-re.html
>
>