Touch with Assistive Technology

Hi All

Touch with Assistive Technology is one of the SCs I've been a strong
proponent of from the beginning and I'm heavily invested in the wording. As
the SC manager of it I've been reviewing the comments, and unfortunately, I
don't think we can address the comments adequately with word smithing. It's
clear there is a real need to ensure functionality works when screen
readers on mobile are running. John avila mentioned sliders, combo boxes,
and menus and I found infinite scroll pages sometimes cannot be operated
with a 3 finger swipe down on VO.

My first thought was to make a short list of common functions that should
work AT. Detlev is rightly concerned that its arbitrary, can leave
important gaps etc.

On further consideration, I think the requirement that Mobile AT works with
sites targeted to mobile is already covered in WCAG, but not explicitly. I
had filed a bug about a year ago after an extensive dialogue with many
stakeholders including Patrick and previous chairs of WCAG2 etc. It
proposes an editorial amendment to the conformance requirements ensuring
that it is understood that conformance requires that author created views
targeted at a specific device need to conform on that device.
https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/197  The editorial fix has good
consensus and momentum, and just needs to be acted on.

This will ensure that authors understand that Accessibility support applies
to all device specific views of a site created by an author. Here's the
amendment language for the conformance section:

====
"The full page includes each variation of the page that is automatically
customized for various devices, browsers, orientation, or screen sizes.
Each of these variations (or their respective conforming alternate
versions) needs to conform in order for the entire page to conform.
However, if a user actively chooses a setting on the page that optimizes or
personalizes the state of the page for accessibility reasons, this new
state does not necessarily need to conform, because the conforming version
can be reached by undoing the setting."
===

The win is that WCAG 2 will be clearer, and that the SCs are understood to
apply to device specific views that are created by the author.

It also address concerns that the current SC requires too many AT
combinations. (Android, iOS, Kindle, Windows Narrator etc.).

Under WCAG 2, only one stack needs to work for each device specific view
created by the author. So only one device needs to be supported. Easier to
manage in a dot release.

If we are in unity with this direction, we can propose together this
amendment, using the group evaluation of this SC as it's platform. Then
retire this SC.


Cheers,
David MacDonald



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