WCAG 3.0 Sandbox

Hi everyone,

The new survey on WCAG 3 process is open (see the agenda), I just wanted to make a point on what I think is the key stumbling block: the publicly visible sandbox. If we can get over this bit, I think the rest is less controversial.

The main themes I picked up from the survey answers were:


  *   What if there are strong disagreements from a few people that something should not be included, that is it the ‘wrong direction’?
  *   External people assume that anything called “Draft” is just getting polished before publication, people start using things too early, and then complain when it changes.
  *   There is too much gatekeeping which gets in the way of making progress.

From the discussion I gathered that we do not have agreement on whether our Editor’s draft can be used as our ‘Sandbox’.

Currently we have 3 stages of content:

  1.  Content worked on by the sub-groups, viewable in various forms (including PRs on github which can be rendered as though they were a draft).
  2.  Editor’s draft, currently a pre-cursor to the working draft.
  3.  Working draft, what gets consensus via CFC.

The thing that is missing: A place to view the exploratory content in the context of the whole, so anything that sub-groups have worked on, and gets initial agreement from the group that it is vaguely going in the right direction, can be reviewed together in one place.   I.e. a sandbox.

We do not have that now, because the bar for inclusion in the Editors draft is too high when it is simply a step on the way to the Working draft.

So, the big question for me is: What would make people to comfortable with having a publicly visible (but not promoted) sandbox?

Note: Our work must be done in public, that aspect is in our charter.

The updated proposal includes:

  *   Labelling the Sandbox document as Sandbox rather than Editor’s draft.
  *   Labelling the sections of content with appropriate, pre-defined labels.

Does anyone object to having this appropriately labelled sandbox?

Kind regards,

-Alastair

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@alastc / www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com>