Comment on the Standards Harmonization document

Good afternoon EOWG,

As intended, I have shown the latest version of the Standards harmonization document[1] to some of the people I've worked for these past years, when writing Quebec's "divergent" accessibility standards (SGQRI 008).

Like I said a few times, we ended up going down the fragmentation path because our government officials on this matter feared WCAG 2.0 was too vague on how to implement accessibility. The main argument voiced was always that there could be as many different ways to implement a success criterion as there were people actually implementing it. This is mainly due to the fact that in order to really understand what's expected for accessibility, one has to delve through hundreds of pages of techniques. And quite frankly, I feel most developers most of the time are just either too busy or too lazy to do so...

I still feel that if I had had a document like this Standards harmonization document available back in 2007, I could have convinced the Quebec govt to simply adopt WCAG 2.0 and work on some sort of a layer that could have made accessing to the WCAG 2.0 details easier. I wish this is something I could contribute to EO in the next few months, as I think we have such a basis with the Quebec accessibility standards.

So, to test this theory, I showed the document and as expected, got some feedback from Yves Hudon (cc'd to this mail), which led the whole development of SGQRI 008 before going into retirement this spring. I want to share it with you today and see how you feel about this. I think he holds onto a good lead. Just so you all know, Yves has been involved with ISO for the longest time, so he is no stranger to standardization processes, though not with the W3C process as such.


// Comment from Yves Hudon, 2011-08-23.

Given the expression "divergent standards" is understood as the basis of this document, there should be a clear definition of what does "divergent standards" mean, accompanied of some clear examples of "divergent standards". If it is not possible to provide such a clear definition an examples of "divergent standards" in this document, this expression could be replaced everywhere in the document by "Local standards not complying with international standards (e.g. WCAG 2.0)". Questions and comments are welcome.

[1] <http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/standards/standards_harmon.html#standards>

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