RE: is any WCAG criteria to account both default and Dark mode for content

If you want to do additional testing at your own cost, that’s up to you. However, it must not form part of a WCAG audit report – you must report it separately.

As an employer or several accessibility testers, I would not be happy if my staff started doing this sort of additional work at my expense. Every minute they are doing that is a minute they are not doing something else, such as training or research.

I have certainly had an adverse response from clients when we went beyond our remit. One said we had caused them additional work because their policy was to fix every issue that is reported – they could not ignore genuine issues even if they were out of scope. Another said it could influence the performance reviews of individual developers because their bug metrics are taken into account. Another said it makes them look worse than they are, given that they only had a contractual obligation to achieve WCAG conformance.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com>
Sent: 11 February 2023 21:58
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: is any WCAG criteria to account both default and Dark mode for content

> If my clients pay for the extra service, sure...if I'm just hired to do
a pure "do we comply with the letter of WCAG yes or no?", then ...

The amount of work involved in testing (and if necessary reporting) the few commonly found accessibility issues that are not (yet) covered by the WCAG is very small compared with the overall task. I am a firm believer that we, as accessibility consultants, should be educating companies and organisations to the idea that we should be testing for accessibility, not just for WCAG (or legal) compliance. The accessibility industry exists to serve disabled people, not companies and institutions (who, in some cases, are not concerned about disabled people at all and merely want an audit and remediation to keep clear of the law!)

I advertise my audit services as an "accessibility and WCAG audit", and make clear in the marketing documentation that that is what the client will get. (I believe that actually enhances my profile in client's eyes - they will see they are getting quality work, not just technical compliance for the sake of it.) I have never yet had anyone come back and ask me to cut out the accessibility bits and just do a WCAG audit. (And if they did, the price would still be just the same - as I say, the extra work involved is minute compared to the whole thing.)

Put it another way - if success criteria to cover WHC mode and dark modes were added to the WCAG tomorrow, would you suddenly increase your prices? Probably not?