Re: change to the section on user testing

> I disagree with the impression of the section that most of our content does not belong in wcag

Hi Lisa,

I think we need to resolve something around what testable means to different people, as you keep saying that everything proposed is testable and universally applicable, whereas others (including me) disagree.

It means we are using the same words with slightly different meaning, so we should come to a shared understanding.

When I say ‘testable’ in a WCAG sense, I think we can agree that it means two different people looking at a page would come up with the same result, agreed?

There are lots of good, useful, “accessibility requirements” that do not fit into the WCAG 2.x conformance model. Anything which uses terms like “common” (e.g. common input errors), “easily” (e.g. identifiable and available to the user), “important” (e.g. management blocks), “main” (e.g. main purpose), will not work in WCAG.

They do not work in WCAG 2.x because they do not fit into the model of a statement you can apply to any web content and get a true/false/NA answer. They might be ‘testable’ in a narrow confines, for particular types of site, and/or in a particular language, but they are not universally applicable.

That is not a value judgement, they are not less important, and the effort to force them into content requirements has highlighted that limitation starkly (at least to me).

There is also the point that trying to make these requirements into content requirements is the wrong tool for the job. Many of them are best found and dealt with using (inclusive) user-centred-design, because they need to optimise an interface, they are not binary choices. E.g. improving navigation is entirely contextual, and using an arbitrary dictionary for the terms you can use is counter-productive.

In silver I would like to see it incorporate process aspects so that (like the ISO quality / security standards) organisations have to go through a particular process and demonstrate they have tested things. That is a better tool for the job.

In the meantime, if I tweak the first paragraph to this, does anyone else object to section 1.2<https://rawgit.com/w3c/coga/transfer-usable-to-html/content-usable/usable.html#accessibility_guidance>? (It was in the google doc for several weeks before this.)

“Many aspects of making things usable for people are closely associated with the context, and what is appropriate in one context is not always appropriate elsewhere. This means it is very difficult to provide guidelines that are always true or false for every context which means they are either difficult for one person to test without user input, or do not apply to every website.”

Kind regards,

Alastair