RE: Focus appearance AA/AAA

Hi Alastair,

I was unable to attend this week's AGWG call, and sent my regrets (which don't appear in the minutes, by the way).

I want to make it clear that I don't agree with the "Unobscured" exception that has been carved out of the AA Success Criterion in this latest iteration of the "Focus" series.  I believe that this late exception to the normative text was added to make it so sticky content can still be used and pass this SC.

Providing a pass for situations where "The item with focus is not entirely hidden by author-created content" seems like an argument against the much of the intent of the Success Criteria - making it clear what the minimum visibility should be to make focus indicators perceivable to sighted users.

I said the same during a call a couple of weeks ago, as indicated in the June 30th AGWG meeting minutes<https://www.w3.org/2020/06/30-ag-minutes.html>.  During the same meeting I made the suggestion that a more positive, and access-enabling approach to solving the issue with sticky content was to come up with some new markup that would make clear the role, properties, attributes, etc. of the sticky content.  Browser and AT manufacturers could use this semantically meaningful hook to help bring the focused content/focus indicator into clear, full view when users Tab to it.  That seems like a much better way of addressing this issue than carving out an exception in a Success Criterion that's primarily about making sure focus is perceivable by setting clear, objective minimum standards.

Brooks

From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 7:10 PM
To: WCAG list (w3c-wai-gl@w3.org) <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Focus appearance AA/AAA

Hi everyone,

Based on the discussion & approvals from the last call, the Focus-visible branch has been updated with the new names, and the level AAA version:

https://github.com/w3c/wcag/pull/1121<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fw3c%2Fwcag%2Fpull%2F1121&data=02%7C01%7CBrooks.Newton%40thomsonreuters.com%7Ca990b285a9dd4d9d4a6b08d8291caf97%7C62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258%7C0%7C0%7C637304550476185986&sdata=%2FnNeMDOgb%2Bq1A6koKB9wpt64lp%2BM2%2FLzBkC3OGVIeSQ%3D&reserved=0>

It has previews of both SCs within the understanding docs.

There are a couple more issues/PRs to review next week, and then (due to the normative update) we'll do a CFC to get that in.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

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