RE: Your definition of WCAG2.0 conformance

Thanks Patrick.
Now I can better articulate what my conformance statements means now I have a clearer mind of what WCAG2.0 conformance claims cover.

Regards
Oscar

Sent from my Windows Phone
________________________________
From: Patrick H. Lauke<mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk>
Sent: ‎3/‎2/‎2015 11:54 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Your definition of WCAG2.0 conformance

On 02/03/2015 11:13, Oscar Cao wrote:

> This has prompted me to think – what about the visual user,

 From WCAG 2.0's abstract

"Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider
range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision,
deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations,
limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations
of these"

I do believe "visual users" are included here.

> power user,
> everyone else? Since there’s nowhere in WCAG2.0 that mentions anything
> that covers us – the bulk of the users that do not have any known
> impairments as such.

WCAG is specifically geared towards users with disabilities and the
specific issues they face. They are not general-purpose "best practice"
guidelines.

> I started thinking about user-friendly URIs. For my personal sites, I
> will not accept anything less than user-friendly/search engine-optimised
> URIs. Would you consider a site that does not have any clear structure
> (i.e. the entire site’s pages sits on the root folder, even though the
> navigation shows them as below another page). Or having URIs with upper
> and lowercase letters mixed (assuming they’ve configured the server to
> ignore the casing in the URIs). Or URIs with joined words like:
> http://mydomain.com/shop/Basket/ViewBasket/EmptyBasket. Keeping in mind
> that, all the references within the website works.

This only affects users that actually read/want to hack the URL itself,
instead of using the site's navigation. In most modern browsers, URLs
are even hidden for the most part (see for instance Safari on iOS, or
the attempts Chrome made recently to hide everything but the main domain
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/181657-google-moves-to-kill-off-the-url-entirely-in-new-version-of-chrome).
So I personally think the percentage of users that would benefit from
having whatever you want to define as best practice for site
architecture/URL is...slim, and getting slimmer.

> So would be nice to hear how others give out conformance statements and
> whether they look at anything else beyond WCAG2.0. Maybe I should
> include another standard that covers the URI scenario?

Conformance statements inherently need to answer "Conforms/doesn't
conform to X". So, if you're testing against WCAG 2.0, you can't look
beyond WCAG 2.0 to give a conformance yes/no based on WCAG 2.0.

If you can find another standard that covers the URI scenario, you can
then make conformance claims against that of course, but that would then
be a separate conformance statement to the WCAG 2.0 one.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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