Re: Proposal to get out of the techniques business on WCAG.NEXT

Hi David, 

This sounds like it might have been a paraphrase/tweet from the Viking and Lumberjack session on Friday morning at CSUN. 

It was good humor -- it's hard to make a technical standard entertaining, and they manage to do so. While I don't recall their exact following comments, I'm pretty sure they clarified at the time that the standard was short and the supporting material was long. 

I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer on writing techniques, but FWIW we do hear from a lot of people -- (some people newer to accessibility, but not exclusively so) that the techniques are useful, including for understanding how to apply newer technologies in accessible ways. The techniques seem to be one of the things that gives some organizations the confidence to use WCAG.

Most groups periodically reprioritize their work and this may be a useful question to look at. 

- Judy

> On Mar 26, 2016, at 12:04 PM, David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hi All
> 
> CSUN has finished. I enjoyed following it on Twitter, mostly. There was a Tweet from a talk that went out:
> 
>  "WCAG is about 1/3 of a mile long, when printed, I want to bungee jump off WCAG". 
> 
> Whether or not it was an accurate quote, I think it is a perception worth exploring. Its' a familiar criticism of WCAG, that it is "2000 pages long" Attempts to try to say "no it's 36 pages printed with LOTS of help" seems to be drowned out. 
> 
> Personally, I'd like to explore this perception that "WCAG is too long" which I've heard for years, and offer a way forward on WCAG.NEXT and/or the extensions. 
> 
> In the early days of WCAG2 and WCAG1, our committee and a small group of peripheral colleagues were the only ones who knew how to make the web accessible so it was necessary to document techniques along with the standards. Today, things are different:
> 
> - We have a robust industry of accessibility professionals writing books, blogs, tutorials, and making a good living doing so. 
> - We have a robust EO group working along side us providing wonderful guidance on WCAG to the world. 
> - We have orgs like the Canada Gov. saying developers can ONLY use OUR techniques to meet WCAG, which limits developers
> - We have limited internal resources on our committee because we are busy with our careers helping people meet WCAG, and don't have time for techniques. (and feeding a baby in my case).
> 
> Given this change in context, I think it is worth considering a new way forward for our future work. So here it is.
> 
> I think we should get out of the techniques business. 
> 
> There I said it.
> 
> We can write Success criteria, Guidelines, principles, and offer a (short) Understanding document for each new Success Criteria to help folks understand it. We may include in the Understanding a couple of examples, and of course we have to prove that each SC can be met. But lets stop writing Techniques, and let the world know we don't do that. We are a standards group. Here's the advantages:
> 
> Then when we are done, people won't be able to say "It's too long".
> 
> 
> 
>