RE: Duplicate Accesskey Values

The level of reporting we provide must depend on the context. In some contexts, such as when you are working as part of an internal team, it might be reasonable to maximise the scope of the testing and education as long as the other stakeholders agree.

However, much of the work that we do is for development agencies that have a contractual obligation to deliver WCAG conformant websites. They do not care about anything else. They would not want to pay for advice that goes beyond WCAG conformance and they would be (and indeed have been) very angry if we started telling them to fix issues that are not required for WCAG conformance.

Consultants should not try to force education and best practices on people who didn’t ask for them and don’t want them. Advocacy needs to be approached more sensitively than that.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com>
Sent: 15 December 2022 17:40
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Duplicate Accesskey Values

I appreciate the importance of raising matters like this, so something can be done about them, perhaps in WCAG 3 or even in a WCAG 2.3. In a practical way, however, this kind of thing is only an issue if we restrict ourselves to "WCAG audits". In my view, all accessibility audits should include both WCAG compliance, and accessibility best practice, and we should be educating our clients (if we are an external auditor), or developer teams (if working in-house in a company) to understand that. We ought to impress on them that they should be aiming to be inclusive of disabled people, not simply doing it to comply with some law or regulation.

We do, after all, call ourselves "accessibility consultants", not "WCAG consultants"!