Re: 2.4.7 Focus Visible

It depends on who the client is, Juliette.

WCAG accessibility matters a great deal to educational and governmental
clients, who put accessibility AA at the top of their priorities. Where the
importance of WCAG rules and advisories comes into play is ensuring that
where clients are interested in making their sites AA compliant, that the
guidance does actually achieve an end result that improves accessibility
not result in a detriment.

Clients may well be only interested in A level accessibility or lower, or
not interested at all. It isn't compulsory to meet any WCAG standards, it
is entirely optional. But what we shouldn't have is clients claiming AA
standards and paying lip service to accessibility facilitated by
focus-visible only styles.

So I would argue that there isn't a third stakeholder here. The third
stakeholder doesn't get to claim their premises are wheelchair friendly
without a ramp/lift, they don't get to claim they are disability friendly
having toilets on the fifth floor, why should they get to do the same for
their web sites.









On Monday, July 10, 2023, Juliette McShane Alexandria <
mcshanejuliette@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been watching this conversation unfold and I just have to put in my
2 cents.
> Neither of you (unless I missed it) addressed a 3rd stakeholder. We have
end users, we have developers, and then we have the designers or client
enforcer of the "Brand" look and feel across the site.
> We are actually working on a site right now where our client (as required
by her creative director) is having us implement :focus-visible precisely
because the client doesn't want mouse users to experience them. And I
quote: "I know I mentioned prior when clicking on the navigation or search
the whole word was outline in a box. Its hard because we don’t want to take
away from the beauty of the site with the clunkiness of the box. "
> I'd say that this client is only moderately clinging to their visuals
when we have something which requires a visible adjustment for visibility.
We've definitely had clients who fought every single little visual change,
even keyboard-only focus indicators. I view :focus-visible implementations
as an often necessary compromise between client/design requirements and
accessibility best-practice. Neither party gets the best solution, but it's
better than it was.
> Also, FWIW, most developers/engineers, unless specifically implementing
accessibility, don't even know that WCAG has techniques. Whether or not
this was an advisory technique I think would have little to no impact on
the vast majority of website builds, at least in the current landscape.
> Best,
> Juliette
>
> On 7/10/2023 12:05:28 PM, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:
>
> And as I said, I'm not stopping you from proposing/submitting an
> advisory technique, just cautioning that by the very nature of the
> advisory it will still mean that there will be plenty of authors that
> either don't even know about it, or that they decide not to apply it
> even if they do know about it.
>> It seems to me, however, that most visually impaired users always do
>> want focus on click, so I really don't buy the nuance argument here.
>
> The nuance here is that WCAG is not just aimed at visually impaired
users...
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
> https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
> https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux
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>
>