Re: Proposal to get out of the techniques business on WCAG.NEXT

This is a topic that I chatted with a couple people about at CSUN.  I do have concerns about the overall bandwidth for the WCAG group, and am always looking for ways to increase our ability to meet our deliverables without either driving people crazy or needing to shift deadlines once reality sets in.

I do believe that the techniques and understanding documents are vital and need to be available and updated, so I think that we are all in agreement there.

I do also think that this work could happen outside of the WCAG group, perhaps by EO.  I’m sure that EO would be in agreement that they would need more resources (read: people willing to do the work) to deliver on this.  I believe that the same is true for WCAG.  At some point we will be handling final details on extensions or other normative updates, and perhaps even a major update some day, and the current focus on techniques will need to take a back seat.  I’m not flying to Portugal for TPAC so we can debate whether icon text is covered by WCAG 2.0 techniques or not…

In short, this is worth thinking about, not so we can stop doing techniques, but in terms of overall WAI deliverable planning and resourcing.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe

akirkpat@adobe.com
http://twitter.com/awkawk

http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


From: David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca<mailto:david100@sympatico.ca>>
Date: Saturday, March 26, 2016 at 15:04
To: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>>, wai-eo-editors <wai-eo-editors@w3.org<mailto:wai-eo-editors@w3.org>>, Judy Brewer <jbrewer@w3.org<mailto:jbrewer@w3.org>>
Subject: Proposal to get out of the techniques business on WCAG.NEXT
Resent-From: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Saturday, March 26, 2016 at 15:04

Hi All

CSUN has finished. I enjoyed following it on Twitter, mostly. There was a Tweet from a talk that went out:

 "WCAG is about 1/3 of a mile long, when printed, I want to bungee jump off WCAG".

Whether or not it was an accurate quote, I think it is a perception worth exploring. Its' a familiar criticism of WCAG, that it is "2000 pages long" Attempts to try to say "no it's 36 pages printed with LOTS of help" seems to be drowned out.

Personally, I'd like to explore this perception that "WCAG is too long" which I've heard for years, and offer a way forward on WCAG.NEXT and/or the extensions.

In the early days of WCAG2 and WCAG1, our committee and a small group of peripheral colleagues were the only ones who knew how to make the web accessible so it was necessary to document techniques along with the standards. Today, things are different:

- We have a robust industry of accessibility professionals writing books, blogs, tutorials, and making a good living doing so.
- We have a robust EO group working along side us providing wonderful guidance on WCAG to the world.
- We have orgs like the Canada Gov. saying developers can ONLY use OUR techniques to meet WCAG, which limits developers
- We have limited internal resources on our committee because we are busy with our careers helping people meet WCAG, and don't have time for techniques. (and feeding a baby in my case).

Given this change in context, I think it is worth considering a new way forward for our future work. So here it is.

I think we should get out of the techniques business.

There I said it.

We can write Success criteria, Guidelines, principles, and offer a (short) Understanding document for each new Success Criteria to help folks understand it. We may include in the Understanding a couple of examples, and of course we have to prove that each SC can be met. But lets stop writing Techniques, and let the world know we don't do that. We are a standards group. Here's the advantages:

Then when we are done, people won't be able to say "It's too long".