Re: Proposal for moving COGA SC forward

I think that Sailesh is probably right that pillars could/should be WCAG principles. Currently WCAG only has 4 principles, but other documents have several more - and the majority of these are particularly relevant to COGA issues.

In our European work on cognitive accessibility we worked with 9 principles. 8 of these came from the ISO 9241-110 standard. This standard includes the existing WCAG 2.0 principles (differently named) plus:

- Conformity with user expectations:

- Support for individualization

- Error tolerance

- Suitability for learning

The final principle, which is incredibly related to cognitive and learning disabilities, was taken from ISO 9241-112. It was:

- Freedom from distraction

As these principles already have widespread international acceptance, I would have thought that adding these 5 new principles to WCAG 2.1 should not be too controversial. It is pretty easy to fit the existing COGA proposals under these principles.

Best regards

Mike



On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 2:05 PM +0100, "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org<mailto:jjwhite@ets.org>> wrote:

In general, and not only with respect to COGA proposals, I think the working group will need to concentrate on a small set of high-priority success criteria for inclusion in 2.1 if it is to meet the schedule prescribed by the Charter.

I would define “high priority” as a combination of (1) a high degree of benefit to users with disabilities, and (2) capacity of the proposals to achieve the quality requirements that need to be met by WCAG 2.x success criteria.

I think it’s inevitable that the group will focus on a relatively small subset of the proposals in an attempt to bring WCAG 2.1 to completion; it’s only a question of when we recognize this necessity and act on it (either now, or later on as the deadline approaches and everyone belatedly acknowledges what is needed). I would like to see proposals that have major problems of testability and feasibility filtered into the supplemental advice category, and the working group’s efforts concentrated on proposals that have a chance of making it into the final Recommendation.

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick [mailto:akirkpat@adobe.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2017 11:19 AM
To: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Proposal for moving COGA SC forward

We’ve been talking about ways to encourage the inclusion of success criteria that benefit users with cognitive or learning disabilities in WCAG 2.1.  The SC proposed by COGA are not going to all make it into WCAG 2.1 due to a variety of concerns ranging from testability to lack of working group time to discuss all proposals. Unfortunately for end users with disabilities, all of the SC proposed are designed to address real problems faced by some users and without the SC being incorporated into WCAG 2.1 the users are likely to continue to face barriers.

Of course, this is also true for low-vision and mobile SC proposals, but the issue is more acute for COGA as the SC proposals are much more numerous and we want to help strategize on how to focus the efforts of the group on a smaller set of COGA SC. With the supplementary guidance document, we will be able to provide additional best practice-level suggestions to improve access for users with cognitive disabilities, but we still want to have a core set of items in WCAG 2.1.

We are thinking about defining a set of "pillars of cognitive accessibility" in WCAG 2.1 and then expanding on them in the supplemental guidance. The pillars would likely be based on ideas from the COGA Roadmap and Gap Analysis document (https://rawgit.com/w3c/coga/master/gap-analysis/#roadmap---tables-of-user-needs) and would provide a structure for 6-8 WCAG 2.1 SC and the additional guidance within the supplementary document would follow the same pattern.

This will require some additional work on the part of the COGA TF and from this group as the current proposals may not fit precisely with the pillars. We would be looking to draw from the SC proposals made earlier but only include parts that directly relate to the applicable pillar and that we think can pass the WG consensus process. Remaining concepts from the SC proposals would be targeted for inclusion in the supplemental guidance document.

We wanted to see if the WG thinks this approach could work and would support us in making sure we can increase the chance that we have a good core of improvements for COGA in WCAG 2.1. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or concerns.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe

akirkpat@adobe.com<mailto:akirkpat@adobe.com>
http://twitter.com/awkawk

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