Re: TPAC review...Plans for the rest of the year

Hi everyone,

I'm looking forward to my first LVTF call, I've been trying to catch up. 

I hope I can bring a fresh perspective, I’m going to make some fairly bold suggestions to start with but please take them as suggestions or questions. I might have misunderstood, and I’m happy to be corrected.

Going through the proposed Success Criteria, they appear to fall into two main categories:

1. SCs that authors can achieve now with (fairly) standard techniques.
2. SCs that require either customization controls in the website, or new user-agent functionality.

As a 'dot release' of WCAG (emphasis on Content), any new SC for 2.1 will need to fit the same constraints as WCAG 2.0. Hopefully that is written down somewhere, as googling "WCAG success criteria criteria" isn't very helpful, but I'm sure I've seen something from Gregg V on it before.

I wasn't directly involved, but I'm fairly sure that any potential requirements for WCAG 2.0 that required customization controls in the website were dropped, toned down, or made AAA level. It is not 'reasonable' to require every website to build customization controls in, so WCAG has historically walked a line of making sure requirements could be fulfilled by good authoring practices and user-agent features. 

For example, 1.3.1 is about using structure to represent the design, which can be achieved in several ways but the easiest is to use the right structure for the job (e.g. headings in HTML).

I'm not saying that any of the SCs should be dropped, but there are some that will be far easier to add to WCAG 2.1 than others. Some might be adjusted and be suitable for 2.1 / 2.2, and some might be best done as part of the Silver effort.

The ones I would suggest prioritizing for 2.1 are:
• Seeing All Interface Elements
• Size of All Content
• Text Size
• Reflow to Single Column
• Contrast: Informational Graphics
• Contrast: Interactive Elements
• (Respect) user settings.

Those are the ones that stand out as possible for authors to achieve now (with some adjustment to the wording). 

The following SCs appear to be achievable in browsers now, so either I've not understood the or you are aiming to make it something websites should support?
• Font family
• Text colors
• Text style (maybe)

These SCs appear to require user-agent functionality, I cannot see how a website would achieve these without a lot of expensive customization:
• Capitalization
• Reflow to Single Column
• Hyphenation
• Justification
• Margins
• Printing Customized Text
• Spacing
• Element Level Customization

There is more to go through on the detail of some of them, but I wanted to start with a method of prioritizing some SCs to focus on for December.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2016 23:12:40 UTC