Re: Text and Wording Meeting Minutes Jan 14, Week 3

Adding my support to Len’s comment and those that followed. In my 30 years in tech, across a variety of industries, it’s mostly been the designers and content leads explaining (and writing company guidance), implementing processes that support accessible product creation, and reinforcing ongoing accessibility practices. Not engineering. I personally have rewritten WCAG into plain language (and supplemented the gaps) at multiple corporations because it’s not engineers doing this work and WCAG is full of gaps on guidance for what we should actually do daily in these roles. All the engineers go to someone like me, who is not an engineer, at many large companies. And engineers often have no clue how HTML or CSS actually work because it’s become an abstraction, and they don’t know the human centered design principles behind why we do certain things.

It’s not just bias to say what we do is only for engineers, it is aggressive erasure of those who actually do this work in tech, and have been doing it for decades.

W3C has long failed to provide useful glossary entries to the folks who actually do the work. This is still a problem in WCAG 3 and every document I’ve been asked to review for the last 3 years since I got involved.

We should follow our own guidance around plain language and cognitive inclusion, and maybe publish some info on what W3C knows about the users, so we can avoid absolutely biased and incorrect statements about who the users are, like what we’re seeing here.

Frankie Wolf (they/them)
Founder, Accessibility Buddy

On Jan 26, 2026, at 14:16, Cunningham, Jory <jorycunn@amazon.com> wrote:


Hearty +1 to Steven and Len,

I worry much more about Engineers (that is my background by the way) understanding WCAG because they often lack an understanding of the fundamentals of Human Computer Interaction design and also often cannot handle (or refuse to handle)  a vague or subjective spec.

Likewise, Engineers are more likely in my experience to think accessibility is a UX problem than Designers are to think Engineering should be responsible of it.

I’ve been working with all roles in the software development lifecycle for a long time and I can barely remember a time when an Engineer has come to my office hours having read the relevant WCAG beforehand, yet it happens all the time with Designers and Product Owners who often come in with good ideas grounded in WCAG.

The notion that UX designers can’t understand WCAG as it is, or the testable assertion model that seems to be where 3 is heading, does not hold up to my lived experience in the field.

If anything, the two audiences that  we are not sufficiently supported with WCAG as it is are Engineers and Large Language Models (AI)., both of whom/which needs more objectively measurable rules.



--

Jory Cunningham (he/him)

Sr. Accessibility Specialist

AWS

From: Steven Hoober <steven@4ourth.com>
Date: Saturday, January 24, 2026 at 11:30 AM
To: Beasley, Leonard H <BeasleyL1@aetna.com>
Cc: Kevin White <kevin@w3.org>, WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, Julie Rawe <jrawe@understood.org>, Toles, John <jtoles7@gatech.edu>, John Kirkwood <kirkwood@citymouse.com>, jeremy.katherman@deque.com <jeremy.katherman@deque.com>, McGee, Kimberly <kimberly.mcgee@sap.com>, Hall, Carrie <carrie.hall@sap.com>, Ashley Firth <ashley@mrfirthy.me>
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Text and Wording Meeting Minutes Jan 14, Week 3


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Strong support for ‘our readers are developers, not designers.’ As a designer I disagree very strongly and am struck by the bias revealed by the comment.

For the short time I've been on a few different W3G groups, I have seen much the same and it seems to be just a reflection of the industry standard of assuming "devs" do everything, but ignores that there are designers, writers, a11y experts, much less many types of engineers at many levels. Agree that our audience needs to be wider, or at least tweaked per document and this content-oriented one is going to be for Content Designers/Writers first, all other cadres as plausible.



Steven Hoober
President – Design
4ourth Mobile
5600 Russell Avenue
Mission, Kansas 66202
United States

+1 816 210 0455
steven@4ourth.com<mailto:steven@4ourth.com>
www.4ourth.com<http://4ourth.com>
@ shoobe01


On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 3:42 PM Beasley, Leonard H <BeasleyL1@aetna.com<mailto:BeasleyL1@aetna.com>> wrote:
Hey Kevin,

Re: IRC cheat sheet - thank you. I linked to it from our subgroup doc so that we can find it faster.

Re: WCAG visit analytics
This came up as we talked about definitions. We were wondering if there was any way to learn more about our users and if that information would help us craft definitions and requirements to better meet their needs.

For example, would content writers or designers understand some of the definitions as written? Would they know that they build on top of HTML or CSS definitions contained in another document? Are we being so anchored in 2.x that we aren’t able to think of definitions that help everyone?

Personally, I have been in meetings where someone will say ‘our readers are developers, not designers.’ As a designer I disagree very strongly and am struck by the bias revealed by the comment.

We’re curious about what we know about our users, and it could help us.

Thank you for your reply to our minutes email.



--

Len Beasley

918 630 5419
Colorado (MT)



From: Kevin White <kevin@w3.org<mailto:kevin@w3.org>>
Date: Thursday, January 22, 2026 at 1:01 AM
To: Beasley, Leonard H <BeasleyL1@aetna.com<mailto:BeasleyL1@aetna.com>>
Cc: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>>, Julie Rawe <jrawe@understood.org<mailto:jrawe@understood.org>>, Toles, John <jtoles7@gatech.edu<mailto:jtoles7@gatech.edu>>, John Kirkwood <kirkwood@citymouse.com<mailto:kirkwood@citymouse.com>>, jeremy.katherman@deque.com<mailto:jeremy.katherman@deque.com> <jeremy.katherman@deque..com<mailto:jeremy.katherman@deque.com>>, McGee, Kimberly <kimberly.mcgee@sap.com<mailto:kimberly.mcgee@sap.com>>, Hall, Carrie <carrie.hall@sap.com<mailto:carrie.hall@sap.com>>, Ashley Firth <ashley@mrfirthy.me<mailto:ashley@mrfirthy.me>>, Steven Hoober <steven@4ourth.com<mailto:steven@4ourth.com>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Text and Wording Meeting Minutes Jan 14, Week 3

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________________________________
Hi Len,

On 21 Jan 2026, at 23:20, Beasley, Leonard H <BeasleyL1@aetna.com<mailto:BeasleyL1@aetna.com>> wrote:

     *   Question: Is there an IRC cheat sheet for scribing? (Yes, we just need to find it.)

You can find lots of information in the links under the Zakim commands<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WkYBc_9PowZRcxp1ld13jkA2pHd-vvmeBf9sZzUDjJQ/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.3rdcrjn> heading in the Subgroup handbook.

If you have any questions, please do just ping me.


     *   Question: Are there any stats we're able to view? page views, search terms etc. to help our understanding who's currently consuming? (We’ll have to ask our chairs or W3C staff contacts about this.)

Possibly. It depends on what content you are considering.

Thanks

Kevin



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