Re: purpose of controls

Hi everyone,

From the Tuesday call I think there’s a couple of misunderstandings, hopefully this is a useful summary.

The crux of the argument before the sub-group call was basically:

  *   There is no agreed & ready separate spec to define the terms for a cross-site taxonomy of common controls.
  *   Having an open SC (no agreed terms) moves it to AAA, or leaves the implementation so open as to be useless for personsalisation.

The solution was to move a core set of terms into WCAG, and allow for meeting it with the accessible name.

I.e. if your link to home is called the agreed term “home”, that fulfils the SC. If it is called something else, you can use just about any attribute to provide that name (pref-destination, title etc.)

This was intended to get past the chicken & egg situation, later versions of WCAG could change that to reference an external spec, or any external spec. (It would make sense if those specs contain the core terms we put in this V1, and add to them.)

The SC text to achieve that is quite simple:
Purpose of controls: The conventional name of every conventional user interface component can be programmatically determined.

This is intentionally quite restrictive, it has a set of controls that are listed in the definition, and anything not listed is ‘not conventional’ from the SC point of view. So you check a page for controls on the list, and ensure they have the defined name included in the code.

This provides a concrete set of things that are easy to implement (by a site and by a browser extension).

There are some issues that the approach creates though:


  *   The list of terms (in the definition) is tied to the WCAG version, so looking ahead someone conforming to 2.2 would need to also conform to 2.1, so the list can only increase, not shrink.

  *   The names need to work as both human-readable names and attributes. That means that whilst the HTML5 list is useful, we’d need to use the human-readable versions of those concepts.

  *   It needs translation per language. As translations go it is probably on the easy end of the scale, but I’m not sure how that fits with the working group’s practice? Presumably translations of WCAG include the definitions?

Also from the call:

  *   The intent was that the AAA version lets you use an external taxonomy and mandates meta-data for those items.

  *   The use-case for adding descriptions for ‘unconventional’ controls could be achieved with a small update to one of the 3.3.x SCs, I didn’t note which one but I’m sure Jason/David will remember.

Cheers,

-Alastair