1 Complicated stuff!

Complicated stuff, but it sounds like you know what you’re talking about and have my backing!

posted at 06:37 am on June 26, 2007 by Fahed Bizzari

3 Now I understand!

I’ve said it for a while now, over and over. The various working groups at the W3C just don’t get it at all. Are people forgetting that in some cases people are volunteering their time and effort on these working groups. But then (as we have seen) people on the groups that don’t like the outcome of the discussion, and like a political roundtable, just remove the troublemakers. It is these troublemakers that are often the only thing keeping the working group in check.

I did wonder about the testability. It did seem a little inconsistent. But Gian you have explained in detail and I now understand why. It sounds strange to remove this. But testing that doesn’t have a yes or no result is basically a waste of time.

posted at 08:42 am on June 26, 2007 by Gary Barber

4 One more point

Let me clarify this. (before Gian flames me) What we should be doing is removing all testability from the equation. Maybe this needs to be documented elsewhere with examples. So the enforcement and demonstration of the guideline are not in the guideline.

Also why remove “cognitive disabilities” because its too hard. This I’m still trying to understand. Working Group please explain!

posted at 09:01 am on June 26, 2007 by Gary Barber

5

Gian,
I think you’ve made a good case for this. In general, I’ve been very happy with this draft of WCAG 2.0, and I think it’s helpful for developers if checkpoints are testable, but not at the expense of not being able to help those with cognitive disabilities.

What about something that says checkpoints (oh, all right, “success crtieria”) must be testable wherever possible? That way success criteria relating to cognitive disabilities etc can be included but testability is still brought into the equation wherever it can be?

posted at 10:08 am on June 26, 2007 by Jack Pickard

6 I'd go further

Excellent article, it’s rare to find people talk intelligently about WCAG/Accessibility. However, I’m afraid I’d go significantly further. The story you tell of your dealings with the group dovetails with other experts’ experience: that the group has long since stopped being about accessibility, and is now essentially meaningless.

Having worked for a firm that took accessibility standards extremely seriously, I’ve seen the damage that can be done by incomplete comprehension of accesibility guidelines and slavish following of the same. I think it’s highly unlikely WCAG 2 will improve actual usability for anyone, but the damagae it is likely to cause externally is huge.

WCAG 2 is incomprehensible in the extreme, prescriptive in the the wrong ways and permissive in the wrong ways. I understand that testability is the cause of a lot of this, but so is the dynamic of the working group. The absence of any actual research into the behaviours of impaired users renders the whole endeavour bizarre. (a criticism that could also be levelled at WCAG 1)

In short, it’s time to stop taking WCAG 2 even vaguely seriously and work on a competing standard. It seems the number of accessibility experts with serious reservations about WCAG 2 exceeds the number in the working group. I know it’s a significant endeavour, but it’s the only way a number of significant standards advances have occurred. Look at SOAP…

posted at 10:27 am on June 26, 2007 by Julian Birch

7 Can't see the wood for the yard-sticks

A well stated case, hopefully one that will be listened to!
Standards, guidelines, definitions; they’re all there to help us do our jobs, when they stop helping and start hindering they loose all relevance.
Accessibility, like other user-focused disciplines, relies on a thorough understanding of the needs of the end user, and guidelines can’t replace that, no matter how testable they are…

posted at 11:00 am on June 26, 2007 by Shahar Hesse

8 How are the Samurai errata better?

Maybe I’m missing the obvious, but I’m a tad confused about how the WCAG + Samurai are any better.

How are things like “do not set one confusable colour on top of another”, followed by just one example of “red type on green or black backround”, any clearer than what WCAG, for instance, is doing by saying “assistive technology” without specifying which one?

And the almost anti-testability statement in the Samurai’s bit about HTML semantics “Other authors’ disagreement with your choices is not relevant to these errata” … how does that help in checking whether a site actually complies with the errata or not?
Lastly, if even the Samurai clearly states (just like WCAG 2.0) that it “cannot be a claim of full accessibility to people with cognitive disabilities”, how is that “finally a choice”, if one of the primary concerns was indeed how users with cognitive disabilities are being disenfranchised by WCAG 2.0?

Anyway, I’ve gathered these thoughts in a quick post on Accessify – Gian Sampson-Wild on WCAG 2.0’s concept of testability

posted at 12:03 pm on June 26, 2007 by patrick lauke

10 What we knew all along

Good article, Gian. Yet more proof that the brains behind WCAG2 aren’t the best that money can buy.

I mean, c’mon! Every accessibility guide since the year dot has said “don’t rely on automated tests”, because we’ve known all along that there are some things that you just can’t automatically test for.

The bit about asking ten people and seeing if eight of them agree – that’s like saying “it’s raining today, it’s proof that the climate is becoming wetter”. How do you select your ten people? How do you know they represent a fair and unbiased sample group? How do you know that the next ten people won’t result in eight of those ten giving the opposite viewpoint? Do we need to sample ten groups of ten, to make sure that 8 out of 10 give the same answer eight times out of ten? But then we might have as little as 64% agreement – so that would no longer be sufficient.

You don’t need to be a degree-level statistician to see just how fatuous the “human-testable” guideline is.

A lot of accessibility guidelines can be machine-tested. But there are also a lot that can’t. Colour combinations may not always be testable, if you’re looking at the effects of juxtaposition of colours. Kincaid reading scores will tell you if you’re using too many words like “juxtaposition”, but there’s a lot more to “use the simplest language that is appropriate” than that. Relevant alt text, consistent layout, logical grouping of elements (esp form elements), even semantic code – these are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subjective. They can’t reliably be tested, but it is still vital that all authors do as much as they can to ensure that these guidelines are met.

posted at 01:02 pm on June 26, 2007 by Stephen Down

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