Re: the guidelines are way too tedius with way to much weasel room

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 12:01 PM, <noreply@w3.org> wrote:

> Name: Brenda Haverkamp
> Email: brendahaverkamp@srs.ks.gov
> Affiliation:
> Document: UW
> Item Number: Understanding Success Criterion 2.4.9
> Part of Item: Intent
> Comment Type: general comment
> Summary of Issue: the guidelines are way too tedius with way to much
> weasel room
> Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
> Life needs to be simplified. WCAG2 gave the appearance of that but the
> longer i look the more i find it is an illusion. Too much wiggle room is
> given without enough strong wording to say exceptions only if you have a
> good reason. The confusing and ambiguous language around this topic was
> enough to make me want to scream.
>
> Proposed Change:
> Simply cut out all the ifs ands and buts. No one really has to use a
> string of read mores on any page. This confuses and confounds all efforts
> at simple enforcement, and give the (hopefully false) impression that this
> whole effort is a hypocritical farce - a case of the emperor wears no
> clothes. Somehow these guidelines have become bloated with so much wiggle
> room that they are no longer by any stretch of the sane mind percievable,
> operable, understandable, or robust. Thanks for listening.
>
> ================================
Response from the Working Group
================================
Thank you for your message.  The reason for the qualifications on things is
that these were designed to allow them to be REQUIREMENTs versus guidelines
or "would be good if you did".

As a result, we had to be sure to have the qualifications or exceptions
where they were needed.  If not, then it would be easy to point to these
situations (where the SC did not make sense -- or where it was not
reasonable to require them) and use those as examples as to why the WCAG
should never be required.

So the working group tried our best follow the advice of Albert Einstein
which was  "Everything should be made as simple as possible,  but no
simpler."

Because the formal rules had
 - to be exact,
 - to be testable
 - to work for technologies that have not yet been released
 - to be applied to essentially all websites  (at least for the A and AA
levels)
we did sometimes find the language was harder.

So we created the Understanding WCAG Document.

We understand this results in a suite that is not as easy to use as we
might all hope. If you can provide specific suggestions for how we might
improve the guidance, particularly at the level of the Understanding
document, we would welcome it.

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact


On behalf of the WCAG Working Group