Minutes of the Silver meeting of 1 February 2019

Continuing the trending evidence that I do horribly with minutes when
running a call, I've added a quick recap of the conversation and our main
talking points, as we had a really great talk through some hard areas today
(please correct me and fill in important points that I missed!):

   - Requirements: We ran through several of the opportunities noted
in our Silver
   Requirements draft <https://w3c.github.io/silver/requirements/index.html>,
   and it seems that the Usability opportunities
   <https://w3c.github.io/silver/requirements/index.html#oppotunities_usability>
   have general consensus from all, though the implementation details, likely
   less so. We don't need that for Requirements consensus, though, I/we don't
   think.
   - Once we got to Conformance Model opportunities
   <https://w3c.github.io/silver/requirements/index.html#oppotunities_conformance>,
   we clearly have aspects that we need to clarify and work through, as we
   didn't get past Measurable Guidance. This has a few aspects of it to work
   out, though:
      - Clarify that rather than replacing pass/fail statements, (new draft
      of the last bit): "Multiple means of measurement, in addition to
pass/fail
      statements, allow inclusion of more accessibility guidance."
   - We had a solid conversation around WCAG 2.0 AA mapping to bronze.
   Attempting to recap:
      - WCAG 2.0 AA should map to bronze, so that we can have bronze
      contain the pass/fail requirements and then silver and gold can
include the
      more subjective requirements. This supports the legal requirement for
      talking about requirements in court.
      - Courts don't judge pass/fail statements, they handle the unclear
         cases where it takes judgement on evidence to make a call as
to the outcome.
         - Things don't go to court because they fail a particular test,
         they generally do so because someone can't use or access something.
      - WCAG 2.0/1 AA includes many subjective requirements, such as Non-text
      Content <https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#non-text-content>: "All
      non-text content that is presented to the user has a text
alternative *that
      serves the equivalent purpose*…" [emphasis mine]. Should we move the
      subjective aspects from bronze to silver, which would move WCAG AA
      equivalence to silver? (no)
      - We talked through an example framework of how to test conformance
      with Non-text Content, which guides the tester through interpreting the
      content-author's intention for the use of an image to judge whether the
      text alternative serves something resembling equivalent purpose.
      - We can use similar measurability to other guidance, using
      frameworks that guide the tester (meaning person doing the activity of
      testing, rather than a person with that job title) through the process of
      determining how well or not a given thing conforms with guidance, with a
      line in the sand as to what means failure, without the guidance
existing as
      strict pass/fail statements. This can enable us to include
guidance serving
      people with disabilities whose needs WCAG can't currently include due to
      the need to express guidance in strict pass/fail statements.
         - This doesn't introduce any more subjectivity into accessibility
         guidelines and conformance than we have today, but tries to
give a means to
         express the subjectivity and potential wishy-washiness of
outcomes, for
         instance where an image has lousy (but not absurdly wrong)
alt text or a
         video has captions with loads of errors in them.
      - Bringing the conversation back to the opportunity we describe in
      the Silver Requirements draft (including the suggested edit to the last
      sentence), how can we express this in a way that the overall
Working Group
      will agree that Silver should include this as a desired aspect of Silver:
      "*Measurable Guidance*: Certain accessibility guidance is quite clear
      and measurable. Others, far less so. There are needs of people with
      disabilities, especially cognitive and low vision disabilities
that are not
      well served by guidance that can only be measured by pass/fail statement.
      Multiple means of measurement allow inclusion of more accessibility
      guidance."

Again, please correct me and fill in important points that I missed! I
wrote that up from memory, a questionable idea to anyone who knows my
memory.

-Shawn

Formatted minutes <https://www.w3.org/2019/02/01-silver-minutes.html>

Plain text of minutes:

   [1]W3C

      [1] http://www.w3.org/

                               - DRAFT -

                 Silver Community Group Teleconference

01 Feb 2019

Attendees

   Present
          johnkirkwood, Charles, LuisG, JF, KimD, jeanne,
          kirkwood, Cyborg, mikeCrabb, Shawn, Lauriat,
          AngelaAccessForAll, Makoto, JanMcSorley, Jennison

   Regrets

   Chair
          SV_MEETING_CHAIR

   Scribe
          johnkirkwood

Contents

     * [2]Topics
         1. [3]Refining the Requirements document
     * [4]Summary of Action Items
     * [5]Summary of Resolutions
     __________________________________________________________

Refining the Requirements document

   <Lauriat> Requirements draft:
   [6]https://w3c.github.io/silver/requirements/index.html

      [6] https://w3c.github.io/silver/requirements/index.html

   <Lauriat> Opportunity for clarification: Measurable Guidance:
   Certain accessibility guidance is quite clear and measurable.
   Others, far less so. There are needs of people with
   disabilities, especially cognitive and low vision disabilities
   that are not well served by guidance that can only be measured
   by pass/fail statement. Multiple means of measurement allow
   inclusion of more accessibility guidance.

   <Lauriat> Drafted rewrite of the last sentence: Multiple means
   of measurement, in addition to pass/fail statements, allow
   inclusion of more accessibility guidance.

   <Lauriat> JF: Achieving bronze could require meeting all of
   those pass/fail statements, essentially mapping to pass/fail.

   equivalent experience must be between the visual and non visual
   user in that case. Must get the same information.

   +1 to shawn

   +1 to KD

   Thats why we have a jury of peers

   these are very good points! intention. structure that JF went
   through could be very powerful

   not easily automated in a scalable testable manner?

   what if bronze vs silver vs gold is more about the extent/level
   of testing?

   this seems to be about the burden of testing

   <Lauriat> trackbot, end meeting

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

   [End of minutes]