RE: acceptance criteria for new success criteria

Andrew said...
"The term used during the development of WCAG 2.0 was “high inter-rater
reliability”. I don’t recall our discussion of exactly what the
requirements were, but my general recollection is that it entailed likely
agreement by most reasonably informed evaluators (not the same as agreement
by most “experts”, which, to my mind, is a lower standard that is easier to
meet)."

I recall the “high inter-rater reliability” metric to be something like: if
after testing content for a SC that 8 out of 10 experienced evaluators
agreed....

Katie Haritos-Shea
703-371-5545
On May 31, 2016 1:56 PM, "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org> wrote:

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Patrick H. Lauke [mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk]
> > On 31/05/2016 16:36, Detlev Fischer wrote:
> > [...]
> > > It is nice to believe that consensus is obtainable but even among
> > > testers working to the same set of checkpoints with detailed rating
> > > instructions, we frequently experience disagreement - mostly because
> > > the issue context or the mapping of issues to SCs makes it hard to
> > > agree on a fair rating.
> >
> > I'd like to wholeheartedly +1 Detlev's comment here.
>
> The main strategy with which WCAG 2.0 seeks to address this problem is to
> encourage interpreters to consider the purpose of each requirement, not
> just its text, and to evaluate with the purpose in mind wherever there is
> ambiguity.
>
> In technical standards, test suites and interoperability testing are a
> common technique for solving the problem, but they're of limited
> applicability here by reason of the many requirements that cannot be
> automatically evaluated.
>
> A common legal approach to the problem of interpretation is to develop a
> case-law, i.e., normative decisions on specific interpretive questions that
> arise from concrete situations. This would work here (given a suitable
> group of experts and a good decision-making process), but the W3C isn't set
> up for it - the most that can be done is to provide non-normative guidance
> and to release a revised specification. To some extent, the techniques
> constitute interpretive material, though they are not normative and to that
> extent not authoritative.
>
> Another possibility for a future version would be to have normative
> techniques as well as the general principles, guidelines and success
> criteria. Where the techniques apply, they are normative; where they don't
> apply, the more general standard has to be applied directly. This solution
> also has precedent in the way in which some legislative schemes are set up.
> Under this approach, the technology-specific guidance would be normative
> wherever it is applicable, but the general guidelines are also available to
> accommodate situations not encompassed by the specific requirements.
>
> The main problem is that the techniques evolve too quickly for regulators,
> organizational policy setters and other parties who need to use the
> Guidelines; and there is a risk of losing the general principles amid all
> of the details, as well as the risk of encouraging more "legalistic"
> methods of interpretation that don't look to the broader purpose of making
> the Web more accessible but instead focus on the minutia of conformance and
> the language of normative statements. Also, if techniques were normative,
> the scrutiny that they would receive and the amount of work involved in
> bringing them to publication would likely increase substantially.
>
> Before deciding among these and other solutions, we need to know how large
> the problem of interpretive disagreement is in WCAG 2 as it currently
> stands, then move the discussion into the planning process for preparing
> the next major version (not version 2.1, but the next significant revision).
>
>
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