Post-Minutes update

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry I couldn't be there, but when reviewing the minutes we seem to be going back over old ground again? I'll try and keep this short...

I'm not aware of much push back against the need to avoid horizontal scrolling, regarding Resize and Linearise:
- The only issue left on Resize content is how to deal with IDE type interfaces, so I'm working on an exception or subtle language change for that.
- There is some push back on the mechanism of linearisation, not the need. I.e. if a user over-rides the layout, what does the author need to do? That is a good question, I've outlined that we need to get the SC into the draft, and then work on testing that leads to techniques & failures.

Regarding the "ability to override", everyone needs to understand this:

A USER REQUIREMENT IS NOT A CONTENT REQUIREMENT.

(Sorry for shouting, I'm in a plain text interface, no bold available.)

So if the SC states "The user can override X", that is always true because the user CAN override it. Does that mean it won't break and become unusable? No. 
That approach does not work in WCAG 2.x. 

It has to go the next step, and say: if you do X to the content, it is still usable & readable.

And in this case X has to be specified, which is where Verdana, the EM sizes and the black & white came in. That doesn't mean that LV people will use those values, but the issues *triggered* by over-riding font/colour/spacing will be triggered by that test.

The second issue is how much things like spacing can be pushed. I'm sure anyone who has tried overriding the spacing has run into issues where things overlap or layouts fall apart.

If the values for spacing are greater than what can be accommodated in the 'normal' layout of most sites, it moves into the realm of personalisation, or linearisation where you completely override the layout anyway.

So a conversation about the 'best' or 'largest' word/letter spacing values is irrelevant, because either it fits within regular layouts (which need to allow for *some* variation because of different display of fonts, internationalisation and other factors), or you deal with it as a personalisation issue, in which case it is not a content requirement.

This approach of enabling the user to override the presentation (and requiring testing of it) is new for WCAG, and there is a lot of work to do to prove that it is feasible, see this long thread on that approach and the push back: https://github.com/w3c/wcag21/pull/89 (That's linearise, but the same applies to override.)

If an SC requires personalisation, I have my doubts that it will get into 2.1. Maybe 2.2 or silver, but it needs the user-agent end to be ready in the same timeline.

That is why I'd rather work on the override approach, because it can work sooner, and the work to test it will be a good building block for personalisation later anyway.

Cheers,

-Alastair

Received on Friday, 10 February 2017 01:25:22 UTC