Re: Accessible Authentication

I have raised this same point before, in connection with other SCs where
the Understanding document either restricts, or in some cases totally
changes the meaning of the SC itself. There is a general poor procedure
here, that needs to be reconsidered by W3C and procedures improved for the
future.

We sometimes spent weeks, even months, several people all haggling over the
wording of a proposed SC in a determined effort to get the wording
absolutely as watertight as we possibly good. But then, after all that hard
work, the task of writing the Understanding document, to go with it,
appears (so far as I could see) to be given mainly to one person in the
Group at W3C to write. True, it was possible for the public to comment
later on the Understanding document when a later draft of the update was
published. But that was not usually immediately following the discussions
about the SC wording. The process relied on those people individually
remembering to, and finding time to, check for themselves, maybe some weeks
later when the next version was released, since that would be the first
time they saw a (possibly revised) Understanding doc. And it needed people
to feel that proposing amendments to a draft Understanding were going to be
listened to, which was not always entirely obvious.

I think it needs a process to link the two parts of the work, so that the
people who shared in the SC's formulation are all invited to look at the
Understanding doc, to check that what has been written into it is in
agreement with the SC. That should be done BEFORE the next WCAG draft is
published, in order to reduce the time delay before those people see what
will be going into the Understanding doc.

In the case of SC3.3.8, all it needed was for the Understanding document to
be amended to say something like, "The purpose of this Success Criterion is
to ensure there is an ... method to log in OR PERFORM OTHER AUTHENTICATION
PROCEDURES". (The extra text needed shown in capitals.) I hope it is still
not too late now to amend this Understanding document.