RE: What if Silver didn't have levels?

I will take a crack at an explanation, though hopefully it doesn't trample on Matt's posts or points.

W3C (us) created a standard system.  WCAG 2.0.  Was it defect free?  Did it cover all user needs of every ability?  No.  As you mention, it has failures (you mention one, but there are other defects which have been acknowledged).

AGWG (us) worked on and released WCAG 2.1.  It also wasn't defect free, and it also didn't cover all user needs of every ability.

We are working on WCAG 2.2.  I posit that it won't be defect free, and it won't cover all user needs of every ability.

Silver will hopefully be a paradigm shift.  We will hopefully learn and apply lessons from the past (possibly even the one you mention).  We are discussing that it can scale, and that it can be extensible, and that we can update it as it evolves.  This indicates to me that we anticipate it will not be defect free and that it will not offer all the guidance needed to cover all users of every ability.  Anticipating this, we are trying to make it updatable and extensible.  I don't expect our first release of Silver to be the last set of guidance ever needed, and that it will address everyone's needs.

If we can craft a sets of guidance that will be defect free and will cover all user needs of every ability, then I concede that we can make the same demands of software.  If we aren't able to craft such guidance, then I believe that we ought not make higher demands from complex software.

Regards,
Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: Léonie Watson <lwatson@tetralogical.com> 
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2019 2:27 PM
To: Matt King <a11ythinker@gmail.com>; Thomas Logan <thomas@equalentry.com>; John Foliot <john.foliot@deque.com>
Cc: Shawn Lauriat <lauriat@google.com>; Detlev Fischer <detlev.fischer@testkreis.de>; Abma, J.D. (Jake) <Jake.Abma@ing.com>; public-silver@w3.org
Subject: Re: What if Silver didn't have levels?

On 21/10/2019 17:09, Matt King wrote:
Matt wrote:
>[...]

> On the other hand, I am pretty certain hat a standards system that 
> does not enable people to draw lines through the gray is certain to fail.

Can you explain why?

We have substantial evidence that confirms the level approach has failed. We know nobody bothers with Level AAA (not even people committed to accessibility really), and WebAIM found that 97% of the million most popular websites on the web have Level A and AA fails.

--
Director @TetraLogical

Received on Monday, 21 October 2019 21:15:07 UTC