WCAG 3.0 Draft Review: Tradeoffs using flexible conformance

[maryjom]

Introduction question 3

What do you see as the possible tradeoffs in using a flexible conformance approach? Would you want to see multiple conformance models?

• Positives:
  • Flexible conformance could help teams focus on the most important workflows for full conformance.
  • It recognizes that 100% conformance for large or complex websites or web applications of 100% of content is difficult – even if you strive to do everything.
  • It could help with rating content even when differences in interpretation occur.
  • Reducing the overwhelming nature of “everything must be fully conformant or it’s not conformant” – where issues for one criterion or in one area of a web page undoes all of the good of doing most of the accessibility work correctly. It discourages trying at all.
• Negatives:
  • Could be perceived as a method to “cop out” of making websites and web applications as fully accessible as possible.
  • May be more difficult for someone assessing/scoring the content for accessibility if the conformance scoring is too complicated or not able to be automated. For example, counting instances of a particular element to ensure most are accessible.
  • May be difficult to determine and document the workflows verified for conformance in very complicated web applications that support multiple workflows for different roles of users. (As an example, an employ schedule tracking application may have the following users: Human Resources, employee, manager OR another example is an issue tracking system application: application admin., developer, project manager, product service representative). Each role could have several workflows that are not used by other roles of user.
  • There may be difficulty in identifying and engaging persons with disabilities to involve for user testing.
  • For aspects of accessibility conformance testing that are manual, it may be difficult to know if you've tested enough samples to claim conformance. For example, non-text content. It’s easy to automate the existence of an alt attribute and count those instances. However it is difficult to know how many text alternatives one should check to verify the alternative text is actually meaningful.

Multiple conformance models could be helpful. For smaller, constrained scope of testing, like one or two web pages, a more thorough test could be done. For larger scale conformance checks, workflow conformance would be easier to apply. Perhaps by having a test protocol to identify the top priority workflows as well as important repeated content or information (e.g. headers, footers, navigation, search, find help, report issues) be required for conformance. This could go a long way to improve usability and accessibility.