RE: Let's add an approved date field to Failures and Techniques

From: David MacDonald [mailto:david100@sympatico.ca]
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2016 7:23 PM
To: Gregg Vanderheiden RTF

Dating would have no effect on our concept of conformance... In a 2.1, there would be no change to our concept of conformance...

However, documenting a date when we created a failure (or last approved) might give jurisdictions information that they might find useful when they are making policy and/or laws.

Regulators usually don’t work at that level of detail. I don’t think they’re likely to be very interested in changes to non-normative material.

I also like Jason's idea of "technology relied upon" given that this is consistent with Conformance requirement 4. But regardless I think dating techniques and failures is good... it's also good administrative tool for us to review and prioritize review of old techniques... I think this is an important concept underpinning conformance which has gotten a little lost in our telephone game of passing on the WCAG.

Dates on techniques don’t concern me as much as dates on “failures” would do. The latter can be misinterpreted as implying that a given practice wasn’t a failure before a certain date but became a failure thereafter, whereas we’ve established in this discussion that if a documented practice constitutes a failure to conform to WCAG 2.0, then it always was and always will be a failure to conform to WCAG 2.0.

If this perception problem can be addressed, then I don’t have a major concern about dates in documents, although I think the most important date is that which applies to an entire publication (unless it is decided to move from a document publishing model to some sort of techniques database, where the individual entries would be updated separately and the user interface would be an application rather than a static document).


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