RE: Silver Requirements Issues

A second element of measurability, as I understand the proposed Requirements, is to move away from a simple tripartite pass/fail/not applicable distinction. How this would work in the over-all conformance scheme would need to be determined, of course.

For example, if numerical scores are associated with various accessibility requirements, then a conformance level could be defined in terms of achieving certain scores in individual requirements, or in aggregate across a set of requirements, or both. The first case effectively reconstructs a pass/fail arrangement, but the second is more complex (e.g., the average, or total score across four different requirements must exceed a threshold in order for web content to conform at a given level). This raises the question of what the permissible scores would mean in various cases, all of which “pass” so far as over-all conformance is concerned.

I’m also definitely interested in process-based requirements as a complement to content-based ones.

From: David MacDonald <david@can-adapt.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 2:11 PM
To: Wilco Fiers <wilco.fiers@deque.com>
Cc: GLWAI Guidelines WG org <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Silver Requirements Issues

​I haven't been following Silver as well as I would like, because of WCAG​ 2.1 so I'm basing my understanding of the Silver TF intention replacement of Testable with Measurable, by hallway discussions, and reading minutes, presentations by Silver TF members. Unfortunately, the requirements documents doesn't specify what it means by measureability, but the absence of "testability" in this requiremnets document is very significant.

My understanding of the current discussions around measurability is that it could incorporate some of the ISO principles of "process" rather than pureky testing the output. So if

  *   users with disabilities are involved in testing the site or in developing the site then that could get a higher level of "conformance".
  *   usability principles are implemented during development there could be a higher level of "conformance".
So measureability means there would be some metric of the development process that would help determine the level of conformance in addition to or in place of than just going out and testing the site without any relationship with the developers or management or QA etc. Auditors measuring WCAG would of course need to have access to these declarations, and there would have to be some way of proving them to be true using documentation etc...

So its a very different approach, a seismic shift I would say. I'm totally into exploring it, but I don't think this requirements document should just toss this in as a small paragraph about measureability.

This of course is my take aways from following the conversations loosely.


Cheers,
David MacDonald



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On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 12:49 PM, Wilco Fiers <wilco.fiers@deque.com<mailto:wilco.fiers@deque.com>> wrote:
Hi David,
I'm interested to know in how you understand the two to be different. It seems a fairly subtle difference, one that as a non-native speaker I could use help in understanding. The way I understand it, measurable means you can come up with a number, where as testable means you can come up with true or false. Seems to me like everything that's measurable should be testable, no?

W

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 6:05 PM David MacDonald <david@can-adapt.com<mailto:david@can-adapt.com>> wrote:
I've filled an issue regarding retiring "testability" to be replaced with "measurability" in Silver

This is a huge issue, and there is very little discussion of this in the requirements document. This requirement is pulling the testability foundation out from under WCAG and replacing it with measurability. It may or may not be a good thing. It could work out very well or it could make the guidelines unusable in a legal framework. We would need to get input from lawyers who have been involved in multiple settlements and lawsuits involving WCAG.

I think it is premature to declare this shift for Silver in the requirements document, but rather the requirement should say that its needs to investigate testability vs measurability as a basis for the success criteria (or whatever they will be called in Silver).


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Cheers,
David MacDonald



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Wilco Fiers
Senior Accessibility Engineer - Co-facilitator WCAG-ACT - Chair Auto-WCAG


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