RE: Finding HHello jennie,elp

Hi Gundula, John,

As we are all agreeing that adding contextual help to the SC is not appropriate, it is probably best to leave it there.

Kind regards,

-Alastair


From: Niemann, Gundula

Hello John,

there definitely is a difference between quantitative testing and qualitative testing.
This holds true also for the FAQ and How-to page currently suggested.

Contextual help is needed for each interactive site, including the Web page of a local pizzeria.
(By SC 3.3.5 this even can be achieved by correct labeling and text input fields. In fact I do not agree in this point.)
The size and complexity of help clearly scales with the size and complexity of the web page or application.
WCAG is not just an optional guide for small web pages and single-person authors, but is enacted as law in many countries, including Australia, Germany, and USA. And it is applied as law for all kinds of applications, not only applications written with html, javascript and css.

Recently in the US a pizzeria was sued as their web page was not usable for a blind user (he could not order pizza). The company lost.
See https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html

or https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/accessibility-the-future-and-why-dominos-matters/


Therefore I am clearly in favor of requesting contextual help. Nevertheless, I agree to

  *   Giving it a right place in the overall picture as was done in the current wording of the understanding
  *   Focusing the SC Findable Help on human help (direct and indirect) help as is currently done
  *   Turning back to contextual help in the next version (WCAG 2.3 or 3.0, as suggested by Rachael), creating a good, clear, and feasible requirement.

Best regards,
Gundula

From: John Foliot

Hi all,

Gundala writes:

"...context help according to my experience with end-users and with testing is the one most often needed and very often missed."

I think that there is an important (and to my mind at least, unanswered) question here, and that is "why isn't that contextual help being made available today?"

I can accept that in many instances, lack of awareness may be the main culprit, but there are (or at least I can envision) many scenarios where it is either non-achievable, or does not scale (or it is deemed "not necessary" by the content owner). Contextual help in the use-case of a major bank I can understand; but on the 3-page web site of the local pizzeria? What contextual help? There are significantly more small businesses than big businesses out there, with budgets and technical expertise that matches those differing sizes.

I am concerned that as we get increasingly granular in our demands, we're losing sight of the impact on the content creators, and what that means for adoption going forward. Telling every website out there that they MUST provide contextual help (as a single A requirement?) is going to get a ton of pushback from the mainstream business community, especially if failing to do something like that exacerbates their legal risk.

As I read the current draft SC, it seems to be more about ensuring that the location of Help is consistent within the site, but currently stops short of what kind of help MUST be offered, instead opting for "should" language there ("At least one of the following mechanisms to get help should be included:..."). But to then also demand specific types of help is where we're going to encounter the resistance. I'm not suggesting that this isn't an issue, I am only saying that we need to look at the requirement(s) from many different angles, which I am concerned we are forgetting to do here.

Alastair writes:

We already have a requirement for context sensitive help, 3.3.6: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#help


To which I note that it is at level AAA for exactly the concerns/reasons I outlined above: and primarily because of the impact on content creators.
JF