RE: Should the boxes around blocks of text in the FPWD have Sufficient contrast under the new SC. WAS: Re: CFC: Publish WCAG 2.1 FPWD

From: Gregg Vanderheiden RTF [mailto:gregg@raisingthefloor.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 6:29 AM

I cringe whenever I see  ‘essential’ in a rule.

1) there is no way to judge essential
2) there is a long history of this term being abused by developers to not include things you would judge as essential.

for example — on phones — only the dial pad is essential.   not being able to look things up in the directory of phone numbers on your phone.  or anything else on your phone.


on a web page — only the primary function of the page is essential.   all the rest is extra

etc


and worse.


Essential is not objective
[Jason] I agree with Gregg. The same reasoning applies to terms such as “critical” (as used in some of the COGA proposals), with phrases such as “critical features”.
What is essential in one circumstance or to one user can be unnecessary in another situation or to a different user. As a small case in point, consider an issue tracking database such as that on GitHub. The search and filtering features are not essential to the functioning of the tool, in as much as the tool can be used without them in simple cases. However, faced with hundreds of issues and a need to view only those which satisfy given conditions (e.g., all new issues, open issues that contain certain words, etc.), I would argue that these functions become essential. As soon as reading through all the issues individually to find what one is looking for becomes impracticable, these features are a necessity.
Much depends on the task to be performed and on other circumstances, as well as the user’s needs.
For me, the option to search a directory of phone numbers is essential, since I have far more phone numbers in my list of contacts than I can remember. Automatic bibliography and citation generation features in a typesetting tool or a word processor are arguably not essential for me, in that I could write all of the citations by hand, but they’re very useful and important if I’m trying to prepare a paper for submission to a conference or journal. They’re irrelevant, of course, to someone who never writes research papers.
The often repeated claim that people use only 20% of the features of their word processor may be true, even if the estimate is wrong, but it isn’t the same set of features for all users.

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