Re: Should we drop any WCAG 2 SCs in 2.1?

From: "David MacDonald"

> Are there any SCs that have been overcome sufficiently by the environment, OS, User Agents etc. that

> we can remove them without breaking the acceptance requirement of WCAG 2.1 that meeting

> it also meets 2.0?



From our testing, I would struggle to point out anything at A/AA that doesn’t come up regularly.



There are somethings that don’t come up often due to the type of content we are testing. E.g. We might not audit anything with videos for a while so 1.2 doesn’t come up. But then we get to some different content and it does. Same for input assistance, three flashes, and timing adjustable.



The only one that hasn’t come for a long time is images-as-text, now that fonts are better supported in browsers. However, I’d be reluctant to drop that in case a new user-agent comes out that doesn’t have good support, or web design trends change.

(Hypothetical example: Someone notices that for performance reasons it is more effective to do your headings as images that are loaded per-page rather than a 200k font upfront, and comes up with a fancy node system for converting text to images automatically. Hmm, that could actually work, better not tell anyone!)



On the basis of our usage we could drop the entirety of AAA, however, I’m not recommending that! I think it acts as a useful framing effect [1], and the existence of AAA provides a ‘stretch goal’ and means that more people aim for full AA.



For the purpose of 2.1, I’d leave all the 2.0 ones in place or consciously combine them with new ones (especially at AAA), but I wouldn’t drop any.



Cheers,



-Alastair



1] https://whywereason.com/2011/10/14/the-price-of-framing-anchoring/