Re: charter update with two year cycle

Alastair,

+1 (and thank you for saying exactly what I am thinking.)

Glenda

glenda sims    |   team a11y lead   |    deque.com    |    512.963.3773


*web for everyone. web on everything.* -  w3 goals

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
wrote:

> I echo the hear, respect and trust comment from John, but also think that
> this is true:
>
> “*working on an "All or Nothing" sum-total proposition, where they
> believe​ we need to get *all* the new proposed Success Criteria into the
> next dot release of WCAG for fear of "missing out"*.“
>
>
>
> I’m fairly ambivalent about the time between 2.1 and 2.2, but there are
> two main problems I’m picking up:
>
> 1.       Scale of work needed.
>
> 2.       Impact on / take up of stakeholders such as governments.
>
>
>
> *Scale of work:*
>
> Even from outside the process I could see that a huge amount of work that
> went into WCAG 2.0, and if I thought 2.1 was going to need the same level
> of work I would agree with Gregg.
>
>
>
> There is an implicit assumption in the 2.1 approach that might not be
> obvious to people who haven’t been involved in Agile projects in the last
> few years. I could also be wrong that this is an assumption, so let’s make
> it explicit.
>
>
>
> Apologies to everyone very familiar with Agile, but for everyone else: the
> assumption is that *you fit the work into a time-box, and release what is
> done in that time*.
>
>
>
> If there are only 3 new SC that get consensus by the deadline, then 2.1
> may have only 3 new SC. Given the time between 2.0 and 2.1, I think we can
> manage a lot more than 3, but that is an assumption of the process.
>
> (I appreciate that the guidelines need to work as a whole, so we should
> also get consensus on the whole at each dot release, not just the
> individual SCs.)
>
>
>
> The rest of the W3C appears to be working in this way, I suspect we need a
> very good case not to follow suit.
>
>
>
> *Governments / legal stakeholders*
>
> This is an important point and important stakeholders, but I’m not sure
> how much of a problem it will be to have more regular updates.
>
>
>
> How do Governments deal with changing technical specifications, e.g. Do
> they still specify HTML 4.01 because they haven’t updated? Do they say
> latest version?
>
>
>
> I know accessibility guidelines are different, but they are also trying to
> keep up with technical specifications and changes. Touch interfaces weren’t
> popular in 2008, now they are ubiquitous.  We can produce more techniques
> and understanding, but many of the new SCs are for things that were not
> around previously, covering gaps in the normative text.
>
>
>
> If it is pitched to Governments as a steady progressions of a standard
> that will be backwards compatible, it is up to them to decide at what point
> they want to take a snapshot. That is assuming they can’t do what the UK
> does and simply not specify a particular standard. In the UK a legal case
> would ask “what is the standard in the industry”, to which the obvious
> answer at the moment is WCAG 2.0 AA. A year or two after WCAG 2.1 that
> answer would change.
>
>
>
> At the EU level their Government procurement guidelines say things like
> “Where ICT is a web page, it shall satisfy WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion 1.4.4
> Resize text.” [1]
>
>
>
> If that anchor point is still there, it should not cause them issues.
>
>
>
> I have to admit I have a slight allergy to how big government
> organizations work (it sends me to sleep), but it seems like the dot
> release approach should work…
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> -Alastair
>
>
>
> 1] http://mandate376.standards.eu/standard/technical-
> requirements/resize-text
>