Re: Research for Visual Indicators

On 26/04/2020 00:04, David Fazio wrote:
[...]
> We can simply give a list in addition to Rachael’s suggestion, that 
> gives designers room for creativity. It feels like this proposed SC is 
> being scrutinized to an unreasonable degree.

Purely from my perspective, I'd say that this is because for better or 
worse, WCAG is now essentially pulled into legislation, wholesale, in 
many places. So essentially, saying something normatively fails results 
in AGWG effectively saying that it should be "illegal" to do something. 
To me, there's a much heavier burden now on not just compiling SCs that 
are flawed/leave gaps, but also in not defining SCs that are 
unnecessarily restrictive. We've already seen many of the 
gaps/ambiguities from 2.0 and 2.1 (in SCs themselves, and in how there 
can be unexpected interactions between different SCs). This is 
particularly true when SCs are targetted to Level A or AA (less so with 
AAA).

And of course, the fundamental tension that seems to always persist 
between needing to be specific enough so that normative definitions are 
clear-cut enough, and the sisyphean task of trying to explicitly provide 
(often pseudo-scientific) hard threshold values and complete lists of 
"dos" and "don'ts" that are measurable. Versus more "human judgement" 
subjectivity which is easier to define but leaves a lot of gray area.

While I'm generally critical of SCs that are too handwavy and leave too 
much room for interpretation, I can also see how trying to be 
over-specific is problematic, particularly when it starts to try and 
make judgements on things like visual design (coming from a group whose 
membership is, admittedly, not made up of visual design practitioners or 
experts in the field, and where decisions on things like cut-off-values 
for things are often just kind of fudged - thinking for instance of how 
we arrived to the CSS px value for Target Size, or the discussions 
around those timing thresholds in various 2.0 SCs, etc).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Sunday, 26 April 2020 10:14:03 UTC