Re: Partial conformance

The challenge is writing a requirement generic enough to cover a 
situation where we don't have the answer yet how to do it, and still 
making it measurable enough for a requirement.

Silver has been accused of being "aspirational" many times in the past.  
We have been careful not to put anything in the Requirements that we 
don't know how to do.  We want to do "substantially conforms" (partial 
conformance is a different concept and we want to keep them separate).  
It showed up repeatedly in the Silver Research that "substantially 
conforms" is a need of organizations with large or complex sites.  When 
we want to prototype it last summer, we discovered it was a lot more 
difficult than we expected.  The proposals we made had a lot of problems 
that were potentially detrimental to people with disabilities.  We don't 
want to put in a Requirement that is aspirational -- that could be 
detrimental -- until we know it can be done well.

Please keep in mind that we *do *want to include "substantially 
conforms".  We are being careful to do it well. AGWG will have another 
opportunity  to discuss this in detail when we do the third and final 
pass on the Requirements in the fall. During the first pass on the 
Requirements, AGWG asked us to add a Requirement for Technology 
Neutral.  We declined until we knew how to do it.  We worked on it and 
presented a proposal that AGWG generally accepted in the second pass on 
the Requirements.  Please give us the time to do "substantially 
conforms" right.

We talked about these proposals in the Silver meeting today, and decided 
to include the key bullet Alastair proposed (that conformance has to 
work for large and small organizations) and put it in 3.8 Scope:

    The guidelines provide guidance for people and organizations that
    produce digital assets and technology *of varying size and
    complexity*. Our intent is to provide guidance for a diverse group
    of stakeholders including content creators, browsers, authoring
    tools, assistive technologies, and more.

jeanne

On 4/8/2019 4:07 PM, Alastair Campbell wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I was just catching up from the minutes of the meeting (tip o’ the hat 
> to the scribe!), and on the partial conformance section.
>
> I appreciate that the conformance model isn’t there enough to define 
> how it would work yet, but there are three stated aspects of the 
> conformance model in the 1.2.2 section, would it fit there?
>
> Taking a step back, the question is: How does a large site 
> realistically demonstrate some level of conformance?
>
> It is a valid question that I think should be addressed in the 
> requirements doc **somehow**, but I don’t know whether it should be 
> part of the conformance opportunities section, a requirement, or a 
> design principle.
>
> As an opportunity it could be something like:
>
>   * *Scalable measures*: Where some guidelines can be tested across
>     large areas of a website (e.g. the interface enforces and guides
>     end-users to create useful alt text) that can be used for large
>     and frequently updated sites to claim a partial conformance for
>     many pages, so long as the task based testing is also completed.
>
> That could be preventative (authoring tool based) and/or scanning for 
> issues across a site. I’m never going to be the person that says 
> automated testing is the 1^st thing to do, but it definitely has its 
> place.
>
> Or this aspect could come under 3.6 Regulatory environment, add 
> another bullet such as:
>
>   * Conformance should be flexible enough to work for small and very
>     large sites.
>
> I think it’s worth including somewhere.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> -Alastair
>
> -- 
>
> www.nomensa.com <http://www.nomensa.com/> / @alastc
>