User-adaptations in SCs

Hi Jason,

You made a comment on the survey that I wanted to pick up on list, I hope that’s ok to do? It could impact other SCs as well, so I think it’s worth discussing on-list.

The comment was:
> This proposal is clear and testable, but unfortunately it states a testing technique rather than asserting the underlying requirement, which, as I understand it, is to allow fonts, spacing and color to be set arbitrarily by the user. While I don't object to its inclusion in the draft, I think it should be rewritten in terms of its underlying goal.

The original SC was written in that way:
> > RE: "Adaptable presentation: Overriding the font-family, colors or spacing used on a web page does not cause loss of content or functionality."

But on the list (23rd Jan) we had a comments from Gregg such as:
> I dont think the author has any control of this.  You are asking the author to be responsible for what someone else does — without saying what that person might do.  
…
> it doesn't say HOW the user will change it.   It is like saying to the builder — your house must stand no matter what the homeowner does to modify the structure after you they buy it.    You can do a lot to make a house modifiable but you can’t be charged with ensuring that it will stay functional no matter what the user does.    

So the explicit thing we had to do in order to progress was make it testable within the SC text. The values were selected to provide a baseline for testing, rather than be representative of what users would pick as such.  The idea is that testing that baseline will highlight issues that would come up for other values (up to a reasonable point).
 
On the face of it you are asking us (David is SC manager) to undo that change, but I think it also highlights that we are trying to do something new in WCAG 2.1, which is to address the user-need to adapt web pages more than the site provides for.

I previously outlined the process I think is needed during the 2.1 timeframe:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2017JanMar/0418.html


And there was extensive discussion about this approach in relation to Linearization:
https://github.com/w3c/wcag21/pull/89#issuecomment-278279258 

I hope that explains the approach, I’d like to avoid getting stuck in a loop!

Cheers,

-Alastair

Received on Wednesday, 15 February 2017 12:30:09 UTC