Re: Finding HHello jennie,elp

Alastair writes:

> > To easily find the help, it must be exist, and that this help MUST be
human contact details, human contact mechanism, self-help, or chatbot.



> Correct.


Wait a minute.

Are we saying now that *EVERY* web page will need to have a link to one of
these types of Help? That is a far cry for insisting that when help is
available, it can be consistently and easily found.

USE-CASE:
A data-entry clerk in a large organization spends their day answering phone
calls, capturing information from clients into a 5-screen web-form. The
clerk (a user) deals with these same five screens multiple times a day.
Currently the form's inputs are all properly labeled, and the five screens
today are all WCAG 2.0 compliant (complete with header and footer content
that repeats on each screen).


Are you now saying that for those 5 screens to be WCAG 2.2 compliant
(assuming this SC progresses as-is), those five screens MUST now ALSO
provide a link to "Help" on each screen? And that the help must be one of
(and only one of) the proposed types? (What happens when those types of
help are simply out of scope, based on the nature and subject-matter of the
page content?)

If that is what is being proposed, then I will strenuously object to that
as again being too prescriptive a demand.

Demanding a specific feature be present on *all* web pages, whether
appropriate or not, simply will not be accepted by industry. Mandating
that *when* these types of help are present, the link must be consistently
located and easy to find/discover (from each screen/page) is acceptable;
demanding every instance of a web "page" links to one of *a specific type
of help* flies in the face of reality on the web, and will not scale to all
of the types of web content on the web today.

Chuck wrote:

"Which differs from:  to easily find the available help.  Mentally, my
“linguistic interpretation routine” parses “to easily find the available
help” to mean that *should *any help exist, I’ll need an easy and
consistent way to find it.  I do not interpret it to mean “to easily find
the help which MUST exist and MUST be one of these four styles”."


Indeed, and that was my initial read as well, which I can support. But if
Chuck and I are reading this wrongly (which now appears to perhaps being
the case) then I will need to withdraw support for this SC as written
(until such time as it is revisited): this is simply too prescriptive, and
counter to how our SC's are supposed to be applied.

As a prior example, *Success Criterion 2.4.5 Multiple Ways* states "*More
than one way is available to locate a Web page within a set of Web pages...*"
-  however IT DOES NOT STATE: "*You must provide a Site Map, and link to it
from every page on your site*" (which seems analogous to what is being
proposed here).

JF

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 7:42 AM Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
wrote:

> I’ll see if I can help based on my understanding…
>
>
>
> > Based on that explanation, I still interpret this SC to be:  To easily
> find the help, it must be exist, and that this help MUST be human contact
> details, human contact mechanism, self-help, or chatbot.
>
>
>
> Correct.
>
>
>
> Perhaps the short-name isn’t triggering the right framing for you? It did
> morph a bit from ‘finding help’ to ‘consistent help’ (which may not be a
> good short-name, but all I can think of right now).
>
>
>
>
>
> > I’ll pose a hypothetical and you can tell me what the results would
> be.  Suppose we have a site which consists of 3 web pages of some data
> entry, and has repeated blocks of content.  Suppose that this site is
> actively maintained but has no available help, and no access to the
> non-existent help.
>
> > Does this hypothetical site pass this SC or fail this SC?  And why?
>
>
>
> Fail, because it meets the scoping statements but does not provide a human
> (or fallback) help mechanism in a consistent place.
>
>
>
> > Does it pass because there is no help which would require consistently
> placed access?  Does it fail because it doesn’t have any help at all?  Does
> it fail because it doesn’t contain help of any of the four listed styles?
>
>
>
> Fails due to the lack of one of the mechanisms specified.
>
>
>
>
>
> >  we need to reword the intent because the text says that such types of
> help “should” exist and not that one type of these four styles of help
> “must” exist.
>
>
>
> Agree, so long as we agree the SC text first!
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> -Alastair
>


-- 
*​John Foliot* | Principal Accessibility Strategist | W3C AC Representative
Deque Systems - Accessibility for Good
deque.com