RE: Findable Help (Was status update)

Hi Oliver,

On a couple of the points below (chair hat off):


> 1) to change the order of the bullets, e.g. move self-help options to the top and order the bullets further down the more human contacts are involved.

This would undermine my understanding of the intent of the SC: Where possible it would be best to provide human contact methods so those should be the top options. The others are included because we have to acknowledge a wide variety of sites & situations and not every site/person/organisation can provide human contact methods.
(See also my last point on scoping, below.)


2) to create a balance over all the bullets, meaning to provide examples for the self-help option as well, like "e.g. context help, application help, faqs".

We did have that, it was removed after the last call (on this SC) because there was  concern about needing to include opening hours (or something to that effect):
https://www.w3.org/2020/03/17-ag-minutes.html#item05


I think the conclusion from that was to remove the examples from that item and explain it more in the understanding doc, where we have more space. If we want to go for consistency, I’d suggest moving all the examples to the understanding.


> Objection 3: IMHO the level of WCAG 2.2 3.3.5 should be "A", because the availability of help in general is typically aligned with a higher priority and finding the help in a consistent way would be subordinate.

Asking for a level change for separate WCAG 2.0 isn’t an objection to this SC, we have to treat each on it’s merits. If this one had a similar scope and benefit to 3.3.5 you could argue that the new one should be the same level, but they have different scopes and intents.

Personally, I think we are unlikely to get support for changing 3.3.5 from AAA because of the very wide scope of application. Anything with functionality would need context sensitive help. Navigation? Login? I wasn’t involved at the time but I assume it was at the AAA level because it wasn’t possible to define a clear scope for when it should apply. It is easy to show examples when it is needed, and examples of when it is not needed. However, drawing a clear line that works across various sites is very hard!

ISO9241 has the scope of software products (and it reads like boxed software!), and it also uses “should”. WCAG applies to everything from 1 page personal sites to web based software, and everything is essentially “must” (until we get to Silver), so scoping is really difficult.

Cheers,

-Alastair