RE: Technolog Agnostic / Independent

From: Wayne Dick [mailto:wayneedick@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2017 4:35 PM

Today technology Independence means that a person with a disability will only have access to the least capable systems even if their professional software runs on a system with greater capability.

[Jason] The concept of “technology independence” (at least as it has historically been used in the development of WCAG) always referred to the implementation technology – HTML, SVG, PDF, etc. – not to the capabilities of the user agent. It has long been understood that the latter may vary – there exist a variety of user agents with different features, strengths and weaknesses.
All that is required of authors is that they use (implementation) technologies such as markup languages and APIs in ways that are “accessibility supported” under the WCAG definition.
At some point, I think we’ll need to recognize that certain implementation technologies simply won’t be able to support WCAG requirements as the latter evolve to enhance the accessibility of Web content. However, I think that’s a separate discussion from what Wayne is engaging in here; and I’m concerned that we should be sure to avoid confusion by distinguishing clearly between “technology independence”, as explained above,  and any decisions based on differences in the capabilities of widely available user agents that support a given technology (e.g., HTML 5).


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