RE: Prohibiting authors from disabling Pinch Zoom as failure for Reflow 1.4.10

> Identify Input Purpose<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#identify-input-purpose> doesn't include anything about user need, only requiring that "The purpose of each input field collecting information about the user can be programmatically determined…"
Indeed, it would be quite a big change going from content-based requirement to user-need based requirements.
[emphasis mine], which opens up the ability for developers to meet the guidance by using a method where we don't have a list of assistive tech making use of it.
In a WCAG 2.x context that SC wouldn’t have been included if there was no assistive tech available, but in Silver I wouldn’t (necessarily) assume that would be the same?
If you lead with a user-requirement as the ‘guideline’, then it’s easier to show gaps.
E.g. “User does not have to remember personal information when filling in forms”, has methods including browser-tools and autocomplete. You get an interesting set of levels because:

  *   A browser can fill in some fields without ‘autocomplete’ included because it has heuristics, but those can be thrown off by the content (e.g. random label names).
  *   The browser tools are more reliable with autocomplete, and that’s the authors responsibility.

> what level of support would "graduate" a method to recommended for meeting a guideline and how we might do so in the most effective way.
I would have thought that a in a conformance statement you would need to specify which methods you are relying on, and those could include user-agent end methods.
Perhaps also specify some at the different levels, e.g. bronze for relying on browser heuristic, silver for also using autocomplete.
Cheers,
-Alastair