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

Hello Amar,

I empathize with your situation! I am not involved in the legal aspects of accessibility except peripherally when clients come to us after receiving a complaint, but we regularly have clients who want our shop to 'prove' or show why we are recommending a particular fix and if we don't have documentation to support our recommendation - good luck!

I've been in the field for about 5 years now and my fundamental understanding of WCAG is that it is "technology agnostic". That phrase does not occur in the specification itself, but is used in the W3C press release for WCAG 2.1 [https://www.w3.org/2018/06/pressrelease-wcag21.html.en] under the heading "Continues Evolution of W3C WAI's Authoritative and Testable Accessibility Guidance".  WCAG focuses on ensuring that the underlying code and visuals of a web page/site meet a set of checkpoints. As Steve explained so well, how the various assistive technologies decide to parse and report this information is intentionally NOT covered in WCAG.

Here in the US among the accessibility professionals I regularly interact with, differences in screen reader behavior are well know and sometimes accounted for, depending on the client, project budget, and organization's desire to achieve only conformance or actual usability. In my shop we do an initial run through of each page we audit with a screen reader (NVDA) but will only write up a defect based on the code, unless it is related to dynamic announcements being presented with an aria-live property in which case we do verify with the screen reader that the announcement is successful. There are a large number of issues that we regularly see, some of which are able to be discovered with a screen reader and that do not map to WCAG Success Criteria, and we list those as usability.

To your point that a comprehensive audit is needed because relying on screen reader testing does not capture all accessibility issues... You are absolutely correct. In the same way that automated testing can catch 20%-60% of issues (depending on the tool, who is doing the reporting, and other factors) screen readers can only catch so many issues. NVDA (or any other screen reader) would have nothing to 'say' about failing contrast, the use of color, text spacing, text resizing, reflow, and on and on.

I wish you luck in your fight to get Infosys to fully audit and remediate their software.

Best regards,
Juliette
On 9/15/2022 6:28:36 AM, Charles 'chaals' (McCathie) Nevile <charles.nevile@consensys.net> wrote:
Amar,

I presume you are aware of the Maguire vs SOCOG case, from 2000. There,
approximately, the ruling held that SOCOG (and their contractor) should
have been aware of WCAG and should have implemented its requirements which
were nt unduly burdensome, which would have ensured that the individual
complaints that resulted from the initial complaint would in fact have
been unnecessary. (As a result of the failure to respect the complainants
rights by doing the work reasonably required in the first place, a damages
award of AUD $20 000 was made, IIRC)

The Commissioner's 'Reasons for the Decision' (i.e. a formal summary of
the outcome) are available from the Independent Living Institute's
website:
https://www.independentliving.org/docs5/sydney-olympics-blind-accessibility-decision.html

Regulation in many countries takes e.g. WCAG, or some technical standard
derived from it, as a proxy for a "universal design" approach that has
specific criteria to simplify determination of whether an a priori good
faith effort as been made.

There have been other legal cases decided in court, but I haven't followed
them closely. (Of coourse, the majority of these cases are settled out of
court precisely to avoid setting precedent for cases like yours :( And
naturally, because companies prepared to spend thousands on legal fees to
argue they don't have to help anyone occasionally suddenly want to quickly
and effectively resolve the problems of complainants who insist on their
rights).

cheers

Chaals

On Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:38:28 +0200, Amar Jain
wrote:

> 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?



--
Charles "chaals" Nevile
ConsenSys Lead Standards Architect