Re: In WCAG NEXT let's put a date field on failures

Hi David,

I didn’t express it very well on the call, but I think my core objection to the failure technique is that it changes (in practice) the results of testing a page.

Question: In the period between WCAG 2.0 being released and ARIA landmarks becoming well known / used (to any degree), did you fail pages that did not use a heading or text to identify regions of the page like headers, footers etc?

I know I didn’t.  I promoted the use of headings (hidden if necessary) to identify navigation and other page furniture, and emphasised that a document should make sense when read without styling (which has a similar effect). 

However, pre-landmarks I did not have the concept of page-regions in the same way as I do now. We were missing the concept and standardised terms for regions of the page, not just the implementation. Therefore I didn’t fail pages that did not identify regions of the page.

So in my mind adding a failure for this is an effective change to what the SC had meant in practice.

On adding dates: Sure, an approved date seems like a good idea, presumably the technique (or even failure ;-) shouldn’t substantively change once it has been approved then?

Cheers,

-Alastair





On 26/04/2016, 20:37, "David MacDonald" <david@can-adapt.com> wrote:

>Today I proposed a failure that I wrote up in issue 173.
>https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/173

>It to ensure authors identify regions of a page programmatically (or with text).
>We did not gain consensus and I am dropping the proposal in this
>version of WCAG.
>
>However, I think it points to a significant problem that we will have
>to address in WCAG.NEXT. I would like to propose a solution.
>
>===Problem===
>WCAG was created to be an ever green document. The SCs are not
>technology dependent, non normative techniques and failures, can be
>created to address new realities that we see on the ground as the web
>develops. This has happened for techniques, but not failures. We have
>created about 150 new techniques since 2008, and only *3* (three)
>failures.
>
>It is not from a lack of failure proposals, there have been plenty in
>8 years. However, it is almost impossible to gain consensus on a
>failure, because there are always a some voices that will not want to
>tighten things up, for various reasons, some of them I would agree
>with in some situations. Here are the main reasons its hard to pass a
>failure:
>
>1) Fear that it changes the requirements of WCAG
>2) If not, a fear that there is a *percieved* change to WCAG
>3) Fear that pages that once passed will not pass after a new common
>failure is introduced.
>
>====Solution=====
>Id' like to propose an "Approved date" field, to techniques and
>failures, which would be populated when we gained consensus on a
>technique or failure. This will give jurisdictions a tool to exempt
>failures that were created after a site was built.
>
>Cheers,
>David MacDonald
>
>
>
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Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2016 08:33:55 UTC