Proposal to get out of the techniques business on WCAG.NEXT

Hi All

CSUN has finished. I enjoyed following it on Twitter, mostly. There was a
Tweet from a talk that went out:

 "WCAG is about 1/3 of a mile long, when printed, I want to bungee jump off
WCAG".

Whether or not it was an accurate quote, I think it is a perception worth
exploring. Its' a familiar criticism of WCAG, that it is "2000 pages long"
Attempts to try to say "no it's 36 pages printed with LOTS of help" seems
to be drowned out.

Personally, I'd like to explore this perception that "WCAG is too long"
which I've heard for years, and offer a way forward on WCAG.NEXT and/or the
extensions.

In the early days of WCAG2 and WCAG1, our committee and a small group of
peripheral colleagues were the only ones who knew how to make the web
accessible so it was necessary to document techniques along with the
standards. Today, things are different:

- We have a robust industry of accessibility professionals writing books,
blogs, tutorials, and making a good living doing so.
- We have a robust EO group working along side us providing wonderful
guidance on WCAG to the world.
- We have orgs like the Canada Gov. saying developers can ONLY use OUR
techniques to meet WCAG, which limits developers
- We have limited internal resources on our committee because we are busy
with our careers helping people meet WCAG, and don't have time for
techniques. (and feeding a baby in my case).

Given this change in context, I think it is worth considering a new way
forward for our future work. So here it is.

I think we should get out of the techniques business.

There I said it.

We can write Success criteria, Guidelines, principles, and offer a (short)
Understanding document for each new Success Criteria to help folks
understand it. We may include in the Understanding a couple of examples,
and of course we have to prove that each SC can be met. But lets stop
writing Techniques, and let the world know we don't do that. We are a
standards group. Here's the advantages:

Then when we are done, people won't be able to say "It's too long".