RE: Should WCAG explicitly talk about *mainstream* assistive technologies?

From: Kurt Mattes [mailto:kurt.mattes@deque.com]
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2016 9:01 AM

In my roughly 15 years of experience, when undefined words like "mainstream" appear in WCAG, the opportunity for distracting debate is created at the point when people are trying to apply WCAG. One word in WCAG can disrupt and derail efforts that were otherwise successfully proceeding with the usual level of resistance.

On the other hand, the authors of WCAG are trying to be mindful of the critically important need to avoid requiring content authors to support every and any AT or user agent. The WCAG Conformance language uses the defined term "relied upon'. Perhaps substituting "relied upon" for "mainstream" would avoid the possibility for debate while preserving the need to avoid requiring support for everything.

That said, if the new exotic AT conforms to UAAG, perhaps a need to code specifically for it would not exist, nullifying the need to qualify AT with "mainstream". If UAAG conformance does not exist, then the lack of accessibility falls to the AT, not on the WCAG conforming authored content.
[Jason] This is a fundamentally important observation. The type of assistive technology under consideration could be regarded as satisfying the following requirements.

1.      It is available to the public (whether for free or on a commercial basis).

2.      It supports relevant standards so that the content author need not specifically support it with measures not required by other standards-conformant AT.
Such definitions are much more valuable and specific than words such as “mainstream”.


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