Re: Costs of testing with Silver

Charles wrote
> Conformance to accessibility guidelines is not a law. Accessibility is.

That varies, several countries / regions use WCAG as part of their laws. E.g. Section 508 in the US, and Mandate 376 in the EU are both procurement laws that incorporate WCAG 2.

The general law in the UK better fits your statement, although the guidelines become a reference point in cases.

The upshot of that is that the guidelines should be legal-compatible. I.e. not driven by legal factors, but possible to use in policy / governance / legal cases. I don’t think they would have been as successful without that aspect.


> Conformance criteria of WCAG 2.x are difficult according to all of the research conducted.

I’m not sure if you mean implementing, testing or understanding here?
There are things which are difficult such as covering certain user-requirements, and in understanding by non-technical audiences. However, assuming that people understand them I don’t think the research was saying they were difficult to implement or test, unless I missed something?


> Silver is prototyping different methods of conformance that are less difficult.

If “less difficult” means easier to understand and able to provide better coverage, yes. However, the criteria themselves may not be easier to implement or test.


> Cost is not as important as results that support and improve those purposes.

Indeed, but I would consider a ‘total cost of ownership’ model, i.e. what is the overall impact to all people with disabilities.

To take extreme ends of the scale:

  1.  If all the criteria were easy to implement and test with minimal overhead, we’d have fantastic take-up but terrible coverage. (Similar to what automated testing provides now.)

  2.  If some of the criteria took a significant (>30%) proportion of project budgets to implement/test, we could have good coverage and terrible take-up. If it’s enough to prevent policy makers from choosing it as the standard for public & private organisations, you’d have very little take-up.

So I’d be very cautious about saying that any criteria would get in regardless of feasibility/cost.

Where Silver has an opportunity to improve the situation is:

  *   Providing means of passing criteria that are not a simple yes/no answers.
  *   Providing levels that can be applied differently by different organisations.

For example, some criteria might only be applicable to larger organisations (to be defined), or those aiming for a higher level of accessibility / inlusiveness. We can take the current WCAG 2.1 AA as a baseline and increase coverage in feasible ways with a new approach.

Cheers,

-Alastair