Re: Costs of testing with Silver

David, Mark,
Not to ignore your suggestion of putting together a document, but I think
we need to have at least some common idea of what to do about this cost
question before we can put anything together. I'm happy to work on
something once we've gotten closer to a solution, but I think this
discussion needs to run its course first.

@John, you've raised a lot of concerns now, but I haven't really heard any
alternative suggestions from you yet. The question is, how do we enable
organisations with a small budget to still use Silver?

Another perspective I want to add is that organisations are already using
"light" versions of WCAG. Even the W3C has gotten in on that game with the
easy checks (https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/). Many
organisations use approaches like this. The question isn't if these types
of tests should exist, but if we as a community want to recommend how to do
this in a way that doesn't leave big gaps.

Here's the thing. If we don't create a conformance level in Silver that is
affordable to small businesses, either they'll do nothing instead, or
they'll use some third party "light" testing method that didn't go through
the quality controls of the W3C consensus process.

It seems to me like Silver should be achievable not just for the top 5% of
websites. If you want to talk percentages, this is the discussion we should
have. How many websites do we think should conform to Silver? Knowing if a
site conforms required at least one test in the lifetime of a website. Ive
created a Google spreadsheet to help us see how the cost of audits
disproportionally impact low budget websites:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/144ddhHfBUbRtWEoPdJ8MqsBDq0wzHDHgWJ-yL-fH7Ow/edit?usp=sharing
(Let me know if anyone wants me to share a plain HTML version of these
tables)

Feel free to play around with the numbers. I think this shows quite well
how 1) small sites need to reserve a disproportionately high budget for
accessibility testing, and 2) how this could be solved by making
adjustments for complexity of the website in Silver.

Wilco