RE: Re[2]: acceptance criteria for new success criteria

Hi all

All of this sounds very sensible and appropriate with one possible exception – the “They must always be true”!

I think that, in its basic form, this statement makes no allowance for the reality of life – that every person is an individual and what makes things more accessible for one person may create new barriers for many others. From what I understand of the history of WCAG development, it is this reality that has consigned many success criteria to AAA level (and unfortunately that generally means that they are ignored).

What is becoming increasingly recognised (in real commercial product/service deployment) are the benefits of delivering solutions that meet the need of the individual i.e. personalization, individualization or whatever you wish to call it. I recognise that this individualisation is often delivered via the user interface (i.e. the user agent) but this can often only happen if the back-end options are available. I feel that somehow WCAG needs to be compatible with this reality. If this can be achieved (and I don’t have a nice pre-packaged answer) it could result in:


-        Some existing AAA success criteria being recognised as of the highest possible benefit (i.e. A) to some users, even if they might have a negative impact on others;

-        Many new or modified success criteria related to the needs of people with cognitive and learning disabilities being accepted (even though what they propose might make things less accessible for some users).

Does anyone much more experienced than I in how to make things work in WCAG see a way forward to achieve such a powerful ideal?

Best regards

Mike

From: josh@interaccess.ie [mailto:josh@interaccess.ie]
Sent: 01 June 2016 10:37
To: Katie Haritos-Shea <ryladog@gmail.com>; White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org>
Cc: Patrick Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>; WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Re[2]: acceptance criteria for new success criteria

Hi all,

Rather than start a new thread, I will add to this. On yesterdays call, we discussed what should be the requirements for creating new SCs.

The current list (with many thanks to Lisa/David Mc D for their input) is:

•  Ensure that requirements may be applied across technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG etc.
•  All success criteria will be mapped to the function requirements it aims to meet.
•  Ensure that the conformance requirements are clear and testable (where possible) [Note: we will need language around areas that are not explicitly testable - or where subjective expert evaluation is required]
•  Utilize the WCAG 2.0 A/AA/AAA structure.
•  Success criteria need to be as broad as possible without becoming a 'catch-all' for any given requirement.
•  Candidate success criteria will be peer reviewed and if too great in scope will be broken into more granular requirements.
•  They must be testable.
•  They must be applicable to specific technologies.
•  They must always be true.
•  They are statements of 'what is'- when the statement of is true - then you have met the SC.

Please feel free to add/comment etc. We are also interested in the 'institutional memory' available for those who are long-timers (lifers?) in the group. So we shall send out a survey soon to gather input.

Thanks

Josh

------ Original Message ------
From: "Katie Haritos-Shea" <ryladog@gmail.com<mailto:ryladog@gmail.com>>
To: "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org<mailto:jjwhite@ets.org>>
Cc: "Patrick Lauke" <redux@splintered.co.uk<mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk>>; "WCAG" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>>
Sent: 01/06/2016 10:25:34
Subject: 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<mailto:jjwhite@ets.org>> wrote:


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick H. Lauke [mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk<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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