RE: Recommendation to move WCAG Techniques out of TR, concerned about Failure Techniques loosing authority

I don’t like trying to present techniques as more authoritative than they are, or less so for that matter.

Techniques are informative, but they are the (often extensively) considered opinions of the working group.  They are offered for review to the public prior to being published. If a company or country wants to specify that you need to require use of the non-normative techniques in their own rules we can advise against this (and we have) but have no means to stop them.  No means to stop them doesn’t mean that we need to change what we do though to compensate for their decisions.

“However, there is a discussion that the weight and authority of failures might be affected by this, and there may be legal implications in environments that look to the common failures as evidence in court.”

Failures are exactly the same as techniques in that they are non-normative but thoughtfully reviewed by the working group.

Techniques say “if you do X then the Working Groups thinks you are meeting a success criteria for this specific bit of content but we can’t promise that you haven’t violated the success criteria somewhere else on the page.”

For example, an author might use G87 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G87.html) to provide closed captions for a video on a page, but then provide captions using WebVTT for another video on the page and leave a third video uncaptioned on the same page.

The success criteria for “captions (prerecorded)” – 1.2.2 is met for the first video with G87, is (I claim) met using WebVTT for the second video, and is not met for the third.  In fact, Failure F8 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/F8.html) could be referenced to indicate that the third video fails the SC which makes the page fail.

So failures say that “if you do X then the Working Group thinks that the page fails the SC”.

Obviously the big difference is that it is easier to disprove something than to prove it.  This is the case with scientific hypotheses and WCAG conformance.  One issue in a page and you have a failure.  One bit of success on a page and you merely haven’t yet failed.  I’d say that this doesn’t make failures any “stronger” than techniques, just that they have a lower bar to clear to be considered applicable.

Regarding the possible change, there is no intent to change how the documents are perceived, nor any intent to support currently erroneous views.  If there are legal implications to hosting techniques in non-TR space I have no idea what they might be, and as we’ve advised expressly against such things, I don’t think that we need to concern ourselves too much with that.  We will still have a process for reviewing draft techniques and a way to indicate that techniques are published, and all of that process will be documented and transparent.

AWK

From: Loretta Guarino Reid [mailto:lorettaguarino@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 2:14 PM
To: Steve Faulkner
Cc: David MacDonald; WCAG; Gregg Vanderheiden RTF
Subject: Re: Recommendation to move WCAG Techniques out of TR, concerned about Failure Techniques loosing authority

Yes, non-normative! :-)

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com<mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com>> wrote:

On 19 May 2015 at 19:03, Loretta Guarino Reid <lorettaguarino@google.com<mailto:lorettaguarino@google.com>> wrote:
I'm quite concerned about discussions that give weight or authority to any of our normative documents.

do you mean non-normative?

--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>