Re: CFC - Update WCAG 3 Working Draft

Hello Detlev,

I appreciate how frustrating the focus on our process has been over the past year but we (chairs) felt it was necessary and, while difficult at times, beneficial.  We are shifting how we work and will hopefully be able to progress much more quickly now. W3C asks that we publish every 6 months, making us many months behind on a publication.

We do have a plan for getting to a set of guidelines:

  1.  Publish this with the placeholder list which was created based on the work the goup did last year. That exercise took the overlap of existing guidance into account.
  2.  Use that list to form subgroups which will create exploratory guidelines and outcomes using the writing process that the Silver Taskforce created and refined.
  3.  As the subgroups create these, the testing subgroup will begin integrating them into a test plan for the various conformance models that have been suggested.
  4.  When all the guidelines have been flushed out, AG will look at the complete list and reorganize it to reduce confusion and overlap. This will then hopefully be developmental.
  5.  We will then test the conformance models using list of guidelines and outcomes and the test sets and pages that were developed over the past few years. We have recorded the various conformance suggestions and aren't discounting any until we run them through these tests.
  6.  Once we've made a data centered decision on the conformance approach, we will use that to go through another guideline writing process to create complete drafts of all the guidance.
  7.  We will then test and refine until complete.

Kind regards,

Rachael

________________________________
From: Detlev Fischer <detlev.fischer@testkreis.de>
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2023 6:02 AM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Re: CFC - Update WCAG 3 Working Draft

You don't often get email from detlev.fischer@testkreis.de. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification>

CAUTION: This email message has been received from an external source. Please use caution when opening attachments, or clicking on links.

0

As I said in the WG call where the decision for the update was recorded, I think a draft of WCAG 3 with just placeholder guideline content after several years of WCAG 3 in the making is not satisfactory. We have spent *a lot of time* on procedural issues and not enough shaping the actual content of the future Guidelines. Conceptually, I believe there is a need for an overall architecture, plan, or superstructure, to work out where things would fit and how we could correct the many overlaps and inconsistencies which have over time crept into WCAG 2.X. I don't see that overall plan right now and fear that subgoups starting to flesh out, in bottom-up manner, individual guidelines may not be the best way to arrive at a consistant overall architecture. (I hope to be wrong on that point, though.)

There may be good reasons and/or formal needs to publish an updated draft of WCAG 3 (therefore my response is a 0 rather than -1) but as a reader, I would be disappointed to see this loose list of draft guidelines - it could appear to be even a step backwards from the six Guidelines published in the previous draft.

Apart form that I largely agree with Andrew Somers' points made in his reply.

Detlev

Am 17.07.2023 um 19:40 schrieb Bradley Montgomery, Rachael L:

Call For Consensus — ends Thursday July 21st at 2pm Boston time.



We previously agreed update the WCAG 3 Working Draft from the Editor's Draft<https://w3c.github.io/silver/guidelines/>


Our pre-cfc email did raise any additional concerns.




The next step (in a future CFC) will be to agree the re-publishing of WCAG 2.1 & 2.0 in order that these notes (and all the previous errata) are visible in the latest versions of each.



If you have concerns about this proposed consensus position that have not been discussed already and feel that those concerns result in you “not being able to live with” this decision, please let the group know before the CfC deadline.



Kind regards,



-Alastair





--
Detlev Fischer
IAAP Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS)
DIAS GmbH (Testkreis is now part of DIAS GmbH)

Mobil +49 (0)157 57 57 57 45

http://www.dias.de
Beratung, Tests und Schulungen für barrierefreie Websites