Re: Costs of testing with Silver

Hi John,

JF wrote:
> Like others, I've been lurking on this conversation. At this time, I have to side primarily with Charles Hall and David Sloan.

I’m not particularly disagreeing in terms of goals, just trying to pin down the how.

We might have to tease out differences between cost, feasibility & testability. For me ‘cost’ is an umbrella for those. Something that is less feasible is more costly etc.

> While the Bronze, Silver and Gold levels has some merit and worthy of consideration, it has not been adopted as "the way forward" has it?
Not specifically, but given the requirements for more flexibility and measurable & task-based assessment, that’s a mechanism to use during the prototyping.

> I am unsure where Alastair is coming up with this assertion. As experienced professionals in this field, again, we understand that there are costs involved, but cost was never a formal consideration during any of our work (that I recall).

So this is where I was lazily using ‘cost’ as an outcome of something that is not feasible or testable. For a specific example, you might recall the discussion about non-text contrast, where the difficulty (and presumably cost) was cited as a reason not to include that SC.

There were multiple COGA SC where the difficulty (and therefore cost) of testing were factors, such as plain language. IIRC, we both raised that.

Accessible authentication didn’t get in due to concerns about feasibility. There already were expensive options for supporting it, but that wasn’t enough, there had to be reasonable solutions that work across any website. Hence that was a “cost” consideration.


> one of my other concerns:  that certain disabilities will remain "left out", not due to our ability to address their needs, but to do so has a "cost" that some organizations will consider onerous.

Did you see where I suggested we do include all the requirements? That’s a structural change from WCAG 2.x in order to make sure no disabilities are left out.

There will be gaps at the technique/criteria level where there are not feasible ways for every website to meet the user-requirements, at least initially. That structure would highlights the gaps, and initially they could include advice & guidance rather than formal tests for conformance.

Cheers,

-Alastair