Re: Proposal for support personlization AA from John, Chris, Jan and myself

Alastair, I don't believe John's comment intended to say "No Accessible
Name Cannot Be", but rather that it is one of many potential ways
developers could use to satisfy this.

I think the AA requirement very specifically doesn't achieve much, but the
few things it does achieve are profound.  There were two key buzzwords from
the call today as they relate to cognitive disabilities, "purpose" and
"consistency". That some form of consistency is maintained in identifying
the purpose of a control is important, even if in the current state of the
web, this can't always be seen by the user without the help of some form of
AT.

The fact that the AA requirement does so without requiring a "taxonomy" is
important, because there is no taxonomy. Dozens of taxonomies is not a
taxonomy. This version of the requirement acknowledges that, and encourages
I suppose "domains" to use their own consistent methods, WHATEVER those may
be. For example, if a given domain were to always use title="Send Email"
for send email buttons, a browser extension could be written to detect that
and respond to it. But perhaps another site could use aria-label="Send
Mail" for ALL of its send email controls. We could then do the same. Sure,
this does not accomplish much, however, it starts developers thinking about
purpose, and how to consistently communicate it and what that means
exactly.

Finally, there is a clear plan (as discussed on the call) that when the
taxonomy is ready, that the AA requirement be removed completely, and the
AAA requirement replace it at the AA level.  Forward thinking organizations
that have done the AA level requirement correctly WOULD NOT have to modify
their entire website one property at a time. Rather they could take
advantage of this consistent identification they have been using as a
result of the current AA requirement to write a srcipt that says:

forAll(alt="Go Home").apply(coga-purpose="home");  //My appologies for the
pseudo code and butchering of "Coga" this is purely hypothetical example!!!

The fact that they could use this, to satisfy the now more strict AA
standard is VERY important. The AA standard begins the process of
developers thinking about the consistency of identifying purpose, and the
ones that want to do it right will start working and helping develop and
testing standards. With the AAA requirement waiting in the wings, more will
see the value of being able to do this consistently across the entire web,
EVEN IF perhaps the AA standard doesn't have immediate impact, it will
drive the impact of the AAA requirement much more quickly than without it.
With the proper techniques built around the two criteria together, we will
minimize the short term economic impact on organizations, by giving them
time to think about this consistency in a MUCH SIMPLER sandbox and yes
admittedly, it is not as helpful as we may have hoped. But, the folks from
the Coga task force on the call seemed quite happy with it.

Chris

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 6:57 PM, Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
wrote:

> Hi John,
>
>
>
> I like the term “purpose” for this, but I’m confused as to why
> “consistently” and “across a set of web pages” have been added?
>
>
>
> If the point is to identify conventional controls across **websites**,
> each site having its own version is not desirable.
>
>
>
> The changes imply that it will be different on different sites, so how
> does a user agent know what to do with these programmatically determined
> controls?
>
>
>
> In the same way that name/role/value needs ARIA to specify things *beyond*
> native semantics, there needs to be a central / standardised way of saying
> what the purpose is.
>
>
>
> I’m missing what it achieves at AA at the moment.
>
>
>
> -Alastair
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* John Foliot [mailto:john.foliot@deque.com]
>
>
>
>
> *@(AA): In content implemented using markup languages, the purpose of
> conventional controls[1] can be consistently, programmatically determined
> across a set of web pages. *
>
>
>
> *@(AAA):*
>
> *In content implemented using markup languages, the purpose of
> conventional controls[1] can be consistently, programmatically
> determined and modified across a set of web pages through the use of
> metadata or semantics. *
>
>
>
>
>