Re: charter update with two year cycle

I think we need to understand the current WCAG model well before deciding
to do something different.

A 2 year cycle is a completely different model than what WCAG 2 was
designed for. The Success Criteria were made to be technically agnostic
BECAUSE technology is moving fast and no standard can keep up with the pace
of technology advancement.  So the SCs have general statements such as "All
functionality is available with keyboard" and "all images have text
alternatives". We purposefully don't say terms specific to technology. The
reason for that is because we knew it would take a long time to put out the
standard and we didn't want to be out of date... we would keep up to date
through the techniques, and many of us worked hard to keep the techniques
as up to date as possible.

Normative language takes a LONG time to get through. non normative advice
on how to meet the requirements of the normative language can be updated
frequently and easily. The good work of EO is an example of keeping up to
date with how best to meet the requirements of the SC in today's context.
Now naturally after a number of years those long term SCs need to be
revised, but they were designed to have a longer shelf life than 2 years. I
think we were hoping for 5-6 years... and we succeeded. There were almost
no complaints in that time frame.

If we want to move to a 2 year cycle, that is a completely different model
and there is no need for the technology agnostic SC language. You can say
"use this JavaScrip handler, and this HTML5 tag" right in the normative
document ... and that gets us right back to the issue that we had in 2002,
two years after WCAG 1. Being out of date but not being able to get new
normative language quickly.

Coming back to the question that started all of these cycles of work for
all of us discussing this, I propose that we simply remove the sentence
about "biannual" releases from the charter. We have no obligation to say
that. Let's get 2.1 finished. New people to the group will learn a lot from
the process, and let's re-evaluate at that point.

Cheers,
David MacDonald



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On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 7:53 AM, Katie Haritos-Shea <ryladog@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Alistair,
>
> Please do not think you have anything to do with my angst. You come across
> just fine.
>
> Those of us with experience in developing this standard, working to get it
> taken up in government regulations, and then imlementing them both inside
> and outside of government - do bring some informative points to the table
> as to how this is going to actually play out.
>
> I have been asking, all along, for a compromise between 2 and 10 years for
> a regular cycle...to which I hear crickets from those pushing for two
> years....
>
> Katie Haritos-Shea
> 703-371-5545
>
> On Oct 7, 2016 6:55 AM, "Alastair Campbell" <acampbell@nomensa.com> wrote:
>
>> HI Katie,
>>
>>
>>
>> Firstly:
>>
>> > “This group, which has felt like home to me, has changed, and has not
>> been the open-armed welcoming place, where all were *heard* and appreciated
>> for their own perspective and experience.“
>>
>>
>>
>> I’m sorry if my emails come across as argumentative or as not listening,
>> that is not my intent.
>>
>>
>>
>> On this topic in particular (where I don’t have in-depth experience with
>> Government processes) I have tried to take an approach of identifying the
>> key differences and pushing on those to understand, but that might come
>> across too aggressively, I’m sorry.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> For Wilco’s points (his email arrived as my previous one left), I think
>> the initial thing is to come up with a good ‘pitch’, and discuss that with
>> people like the one Gregg suggested.
>>
>>
>>
>> > “To the pro-2 year people, is there anything you can think of that can
>> help address the concerns of the people who are against it?”
>>
>>
>>
>> For Governments that specify a version of a standard (which is not all of
>> them) and have very long time-frames: I would try pitching the dot-releases
>> as regular updates they do not have to take up, but they should look to
>> Silver / 3.0 as the next major release.
>>
>>
>>
>> > “And for the people against the 2-year release, are there anything you
>> can think of that would allow for faster release of success criteria, while
>> keeping to a 5+ year WCAG update schedule?”
>>
>>
>>
>> Unfortunately, the faster release of normative SCs *is* the issue, if
>> people still agree with the approach of having 2.1 rather than extensions
>> (which I do), then we are talking about updates to normative WCAG.
>>
>>
>>
>> If we try to get all the SCs from the tasks forces into 2.1, we are in a
>> situation of: Quick, Good, Cheap – pick any two.
>>
>>
>>
>> ·         Quick & Good: We’d need to hire several FTE people to work on
>> it, like WCAG 2.0 effectively had (is that an option?).
>>
>> ·         Quick & cheap: Inconsistent guidelines that fail all concerned.
>>
>> ·         Good & cheap: Next version in 5+ years.
>>
>>
>>
>> None of those are good options, so to me that is why we need an
>> iterative/dot-release approach, to get around the quick/cheap/good issue by
>> releasing new SCs in smaller chunks.
>>
>>
>>
>> Am I missing something?
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>>
>> -Alastair
>>
>