charter update with two year cycle

Hello:
Just wanted to drop a line regarding updating the charter to include two-year-cycles for WCAG.

Updating guidance or "understanding" documents is fine, but when we touch the success criteria we effect many many more associated activities and the knock-on effect can take a significant time to be understood and completed.  I can only recommend that minimum of five years be considered as a requirement for updates if success criteria are involved to allow for uptake and use within the legal, technical, and organizational communites of practice who make use of the content when updated.

Here for example is at least one series of activities I would foresee from an update to success criteria:


1.        International government Standards Organiations would need to assess and adopt the change.  This could take anywhere from twelve to twenty-four months at minimum.

2.       In parallel, organizations who are forward-leaning within governments and industry develop new usage materials, test procedures, and training products.  Twelve to twenty-four months but not fully overlapped.

3.       Government and industry begin training the technical and project management folks on the changes, new test processes, development practices.  Another twelve to twenty-four months not fully overlapped.



So as you can see this would easily consume five years from adoption of new success criteria to actual real world usage.  Updating Sc(s) faster than the follow on activities can use them will mean that we'll always be out of sync.  Setting more realistic timelines for updates and publicizing the time lines for all to work from will help expedite this greatly for all involved.

Allen Hoffman
Deputy Executive Director
The Office of Accessible Systems & Technology
Department of Homeland Security
202-447-0503 (voice)
allen.hoffman@hq.dhs.gov<mailto:allen.hoffman@hq.dhs.gov>

DHS Accessibility Helpdesk
202-447-0440 (voice)
202-447-0582 (fax)
202-447-5857 (TTY)
accessibility@dhs.gov<mailto:accessibility@dhs.gov>

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