Re: What happens when an evaluation statement already exists?

 From the "Techniques for WCAG 2.0" document:

"Please note that the contents of this document are informative (they 
provide guidance), and not normative (they do not set requirements for 
conforming to WCAG 2.0)."

The only normative document is the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation, so you 
cannot tell anyone that you have to use a particular technique to check 
the accessibility of a website. Techniques may -and will- change in the 
future due to new technologies or methods, varying accessibility 
support, wrong concepts or any other circumstance.

Of course, any WCAG-related evaluation procedure must ensure that WCAG 
2.0 itself is met, taking into account that conformance can be reached 
through many different ways, provided that they are accessibility 
supported; indeed, WCAG Conformance comes from meeting the 5 Conformance 
Requirements, and the Success Criteria are indirectly pointed from them.

If a website owner claims conformance and the website is in fact WAG 2.0 
conformant, the method used to assess this should be irrelevant. If a 
particular method to assess WCAG 2.0 conformance states that a 
conformant website is non-conformant, there is a flaw in the method, and 
not in the website or in WCAG.

That said, it is true that sometimes we may disagree about the 
interpretation of certain important things, such as the required degree 
of accessibility support, the applicability of conforming alternate 
versions or other things that can lead to different results.

Of course, these differences can be very important from a legal 
perspective, but I assume that WCAG 2.0 is a technical document, not a 
legal one, and if someone cannot access and a discrimination exists, it 
doesn't matter if you claim conformance, and you cannot excuse the 
discrimination because "technically" you meet the guidelines.

In any case, overimposing a precedence on the techniques used to 
evaluate (not the techniques used to develop) could lead to owners 
claiming conformance but not conforming to WCAG 2.0, and then pretending 
that you must use *their* techniques to evaluate, not yours. For 
example, they could say that they used the keyboard (without a screen 
reader) to check keyboard accessibility, but if I check with the screen 
reader running maybe the website is completely unusable. Should I agree 
with the claim just because they did not test a real world case? Must I 
consider this website accessible?

In conclusion, I am totally against any imposition that gives more 
precedence to a particular evaluation procedure, of course provided that 
the evaluation methods follow the WCAG Recommendation.

Regards,
Ramón.


Alistair said:

> If I say I have used this set of techniques, and I have undertaken all 
> associated checks, I would not want to be told that I did not conform 
> because I did not use another set of techniques - possibly bound 
> together in some monitoring tool.  
> 
> Or, think about two EU states using slightly different monitoring tools 
> - which conflict.   Having chaired the Evaluation Methods Task Force for 
> the EuroAccessibility Consortium, and a similar European task force in 
> the initial WABCluster I can say that such conflicts are the rule, 
> rather than the exception. 
> 
> So, a concrete proposal for an addition to step 1.d would be:
> 
> "If documented evaluation procedures are provided along with an 
> evaluation statement or WCAG 2.0 conformance claim, the documented 
> evaluation procedures provided should take precedence over any other 
> evaluation procedure when undertaking an evaluation."

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2014 08:45:46 UTC