RE: SC 1.3.4 - Understanding doc update

Hi everyone,

(Do I need to say “Chair hat off” for these things now? If so, it’s off.)

Wow, it seems I stepped out just before it got busy about this one. Going through the minutes, I think there might be a couple of misunderstandings, and only some part of this matters for an Understanding doc in 2.1.

Also, switching from COGA to general AG list + Lisa.

Does 1.3.4 support personalisation?
Katie picked up on Lisa’s response of “No” last week, and without wanting to put words in Lisa’s mouth, I think the nuanced answer is ‘not in a way that looks anything like what was hoped for’.

Partly that is because these tokens would represent about 5-10% (rough-guess) of what would be provided by the personalisation spec, so in that way this SC does not represent personalisation.

Technically yes, the attributes added could be used to add icons, however, today (for implementations) we don’t have two user-agents (or two sites) that add icons based on autocomplete  tokens.

However, it is a useful (but different) SC.

Brooks, Steve – going back to the user needs, see table 3:
https://rawgit.com/w3c/coga/master/gap-analysis/table.html#table3


Just one item out of several: “I need help avoiding mistakes, and minimizing the mistakes I might make.”

Automatically filling in your address, postal code, credit card, email phone… these are often critical for people with cognitive issues (as attested by Lisa and EA on the COGA call).

Jason – User agents might support this already, but no one is asked to use it for accessibility reasons. Headings & Alt text are supported by user-agents, but we still have SCs for them.

Katie – I’m fairly sure the AI/heuristics aspects is a red herring for this purpose. We don’t want a machine guessing which inputs are your email or credit card number, we want the author to specify it. Anyone who’s used (unedited) auto-“craptions”, or the current auto-filling extensions knows they are too hit & miss.
I’ve seen demos of AI adding icons to content, and that’s useful for blocks of text, but it isn’t useful for saying what landmarks should be, or common input purposes, at least in a 2.x time frame.

Anyway, what I was recommending on the COGA list (which John picked up on) was that we really dial-back on the personalisation in the understanding doc. It was entirely about personalisation:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/identify-common-purpose.html


My proposed update (initial draft) is here:
https://alastairc.ac/tmp/autocomplete.html

(And in github: https://github.com/alastc/wcag21/blob/identify-common-purpose/understanding/21/identify-common-purpose.html )

I agree with Katie that it should be moved to 3.3, and call it something else. Autocomplete, input assistance, I don’t have strong feelings about that.

It needs some additions, but given the significant changes to the SC text, I think the Understanding doc needed a fresh start.

Cheers,

-Alastair