RE: Comprehensive WCAG conformance leads to accessibility for all irrespective of the technology used-any statement to prove this legally?

I can’t address some of your questions, and unfortunately the answer I can give doesn’t support your case. Even though WCAG conformance is technology independent, comprehensive conformance to WCAG does not guarantee that you won’t get different results with different assistive technologies. In the case of screen readers, the behaviour is always different.

WCAG requires that websites expose information including the roles, states and properties of elements, such that assistive technologies can interact with the website correctly and convey the correct information to the user. However, WCAG does not require websites to be tested using assistive technologies and it does not require the website to work correctly with them.

Assistive technology behaviour is covered by the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) and is the responsibility of the assistive technology vendor. In principle, if a website is WCAG conformant and an assistive technology is UAAG conformant, then the website should work correctly with that assistive technology. However, the UAAG do not specify exactly how screen readers should behave under all circumstances.

In practice, no two screen readers behave the same. There are some intentional differences, such as Voiceover not having a “virtual cursor” mode, which JAWS and NVDA do have. There will also be unintentional differences because the vendors don’t copy each other (too much). Inevitably, screen readers will have bugs, so they do not work as the vendor intended and perhaps genuinely believes they do.

Furthermore, the HTML, CSS, ARIA and JavaScript specifications are under continuous development. No screen reader supports every aspect of them. Many aspects are widely supported, but support for new aspects is inevitably variable, and even some old aspects are not supported by all screen readers.

Perhaps the biggest difference between JAWS and NVDA is the use of heuristics. Screen reader vendors know that only a tiny percentage of websites are coded properly, so to improve the user experience, JAWS uses heuristics to guess what the author really meant. For instance, if a textbox is not labelled, JAWS assumes that the text immediately before it in the DOM is its label, which will be correct most of the time (but not always). By contrast, NVDA does not appear to use any heuristics, so in this case it would announce the textbox as being unlabelled.

As a rule, NVDA gives a more accurate user experience, while JAWS gives a better user experience because it compensates for some aspects of bad coding. It is therefore curious that the tax submission portal would work better with NVDA. I can’t imagine what weird coding Infosys have done that results in that. Can you give me access to the portal?

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Amar Jain <amarjain@amarjain.com>
Sent: 14 September 2022 06:38
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Comprehensive WCAG conformance leads to accessibility for all irrespective of the technology used-any statement to prove this legally?


Dear all,



By way of a quick introduction, I am Amar Jain, a corporate lawyer and a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility based out of India.



We have a case going on for inaccessibility of our tax submission portal. The vendor is Infosys, and the problem is that only those issues that we are highlighting are getting resolved and comprehensive audit is not being done due to commercial reasons.



Further, there seems to be hard coding for NVDA, as the portal is reasonably functional with NVDA and not with Jaws. The lack of audit is also leaving behind persons with other disabilities.



The argument of the vendor is that it is because of the architecture of the portal which is why NVDA will be the only screen reader which should be used for maximum functionality. Second argument is more legal in nature, which is to say that current Indian standards only restrict testing with NVDA which we can work around.



We need to prove to the Court that a comprehensive WCAG conformance is technology independent and irrespective of the technology that people use, a comprehensive conformance will ensure widest accessibility possible.



Is there any document which backs-up this statement and is there any precedent where comprehensive audit has been asked by way of a court order?



In nutshell, I need to convince the court that a comprehensive audit is the only way to go, and a comprehensive conformance to WCAG will not produce different results with different technologies in terms of accessibility.



Your valuable inputs will be greatly appreciated before September 22.



Regards,

Amar Jain