– DRAFT –
AGWG and Sustainable Web IG

<morganm> Hello present+

mgifford2: we're starting with a couple of presentations

<tzviya> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1frHcoCbxJ45OtwA76CmgfNAE57W4rboW/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104409146103753773756&rtpof=true&sd=true

tzviya: I'll give an overview of the WSG

tzviya: the WSG are divided over 4 sections, role based

tzviya: the first one is business, products and strategy, aimed at people making organisational decisions

tzviya: usually applies to the whole organisation

tzviya: then the next section is about web development, probably the one people are most familiar with here, includes things like avoiding unnecessary code.

tzviya: then next there's hosting and infrastructure, about things like data centres and using a sustainanable hosting provider

tzviya: then the last one has UX guidelines

<morganm> Hello, My name is Morgan, I am a volunteer IE for the Sustainability Interest Group. Happy to discuss or add any notes about what we are working on and about

tzviya: the WSG has a lot of information on measurement. We spent a lot of time on this today.

tzviya: I won't go into much details but our measurement related stuff is quite different from AGWG.

tzviya: we took some inspiration re supplemental guidance from AGWG and the way Techniques work

tzviya: and we want to create a policy document like AGWG, thanks for th e idea

Slideset: https://www.w3.org/2025/Talks/TPAC/wcag3-update/

tzviya: there are also a bunch of tools people developed that use the guidelines and present them in a different way

tzviya: we're happy to receive your feedback

tzviya: over to the update from AGWG

Rachael: we have some general goals we try to meet with WCAG 3: a new structure that helps people understand the doc better, and we want to center the doc around user needs

<mgifford2> The WSG's previous meeting with performance had a focus on the value of focusing on user needs.

Rachael: we tag our content with 'content maturity levels', so that we can develop the standard faster and indicate how far along each piece of content is, from placeholder, to exploratory, to developing to defining to mature.

Rachael: in general, the WCAG 3 structure has guidelines with plain language 'outcome statements', within those we have foundational and supplemental requirements, including how tos (methods and tests) and assertions

Rachael: so the guidelines exist within a larger ecosystem of documentation

Rachael: assertions are a new concept within WCAG 3

Rachael: we don't have them in WCAG 2

Rachael: to allow for organisations to state things like 'we have conducted user testing'

kevin: this may be something relevant to the sustainability guidelines

<mgifford2> Good to learn about the assertions. I hadn't realized that had been added.

kevin: we found that there are certain things that are hard to test, but still relevant to have organisations state and get credits for, that's why we came up with assertions

Rachael: here's an example of a requirement: “text can be increased in size to at least 200% of the platform's default body text size”

Rachael: we are writing these reqs more granularly than we used to in WCAG 2…. we try not to put everything into on single sentence, we put exceptions and applicability info into a separate section to make it easier to read

kevin: an advantage is, it makes it easier to recognise what are good things to do

kevin: another thing we did was separate between different levels of specific requirements, so where automated captions are base level, human captions are a better version of it

Rachael: we want to highlight that we are trying to make WCAG future ready

Rachael: we are trying to make it implementor neutral and author centered. So that it is easier to have requirements met not by the author but by new technologies should they become available

Jaunita_Flessas: in AGWG should we be try to focus on our carbon footprint from an ethical perspective. Should we think about advancing accessibility in a sustainable way?

tzviya: great question, let's leave this for the discussion part

Rachael: on slide 11 we have an example of an assertion: 'plain language review'

Rachael: this concept is really important to consider, though difficult to test, the assertions have a potential there

Rachael: we're exploring a conformance approach right now where there is a combo of foundational requirements and supplemental. Idea is that orgs meet all foundational requirements and then add a subset of the supplemental requirements, ideally picked against functional needs, we're exploring that now.

Rachael: conformance itself is about the foundational line

Rachael: this is a new approach departing from current WCAG, which has levels A, AA, AAA

tzviya: we are beginning to think about sustainability as a new area for horizontal review. We should think about how this overlaps with existing accessibility horizontal review

<mgifford2> I'd love to learn more about the decision to go Foundation + Bronze, Silver & Gold - it might be worth mirroring

tzviya: I've not done anything formal re the carbon footprint of other specs

kevin: paraphrasing Jaunita_Flessas … should we add sustainability guidelines within WCAG? my answer would be no, they are separate guidelines

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to respond

<Zakim> kevin, you wanted to respond

<hdv> +1 kevin (we've also avoided a11y guidelines within WSG

Jaunita_Flessas: if there's a more sustainable way to achieve an accessible outcome, we should be addressing those rather than the less sustainable version.

<chrisp> +present

AlexDawson: accessibility affects sustainability… the way you could reflect that in WCAG… eg what is the energy use of someone using assistive tooling?

AlexDawson: there could also be a considerable sustainable burden that is negative on a societal level, needs more examination

<Lisa> https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/

Lisa: tzviya, in your slide I saw something regarding whether we need images… images like icons can have a huge benefit for COGA

Lisa: when people can't access their bank they get in a car or a cab to go to the bank

<denisDIDIER> As said before sustainability & accessibility compliance are horizontal different process. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they complete each other. But because there is the PEOPLE dimension in sustainability, they are never very opposite.

<tzviya> +1 denisDIDIER

tzviya: the success criteria specifically mentions it not applying when it has positive value

Lisa: we have to be careful re comprehension including for aging population

<Zakim> JenStrickland, you wanted to say My understanding of what Janina asked was.

JenStrickland: how I interpreted Jaunita_Flessas's point… there may be overlaps between AGWG and sustainability, note that we think about accessibility when we work on the guidelines

JenStrickland: we probably should tag each other

JenStrickland: we might want to have ongoing meetings to answer each others questions

<Zakim> kevin, you wanted to talk about requirements and methods and to comment on the tension between accessibility and sustainability

JenStrickland: we do have AGWG and former AGWG members in SWING

<AlexDawson> We love accessibility!

<Lisa> Just checking that https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/ was also included in the look at accessibility as it is NOT in WCAG

<mgifford2> Thanks for the link Lisa COGA is doing important work.

kevin: thinking about requirements and methods in WCAG, there's a tension between accessibility and sustainability. We outline in requirements what needs to happen. We outline in methods how it _can happen_. The sustainability bit are probably related to methods.

<Zakim> morganm, you wanted to clarify assertions

<Ben_Till1> +1 that equity must come first, but only when it's done in the most sustainable way

kevin: question is, how do we balance that

<mgifford2> Good point wendyreid

morganm: wanted to ask about assertions… interesting development, could we learn from it more?

shadi: don't think we'vef fully nailed down assertions yet

<Ben_Till1> Link to info on assertions as it stands in the latest wcag 3.0 editors draft: https://w3c.github.io/wcag3/explainer/#assertions

shadi: in WSG, I saw the requirements about 'choosing an accessible provider'… this seems like a good use case for an assertion as it is not something an individual website author has anything to do with

shadi:

<wendyreid> [collective groan]

<denisDIDIER> Accessibility assistant agent based on AI, may be efficient for accessibility concerns, but we know environmental impact is huge. Should we make decision not to use this kind of tools ? Don't think so, but raise awareness for user to find alternatives with same features but less footprint

<Zakim> shadi, you wanted to agree with Lisa; not over-simplify cost of accessibility and to support horizontal review

shadi: let's be careful we're not too simplistic, eg say adding some lines of code for ARIA that costs more… that framing can lead to false understandings, if we go down that road

shadi: +1 to horizontal review, that's a great approach for both sides

wendyreid: regarding the overlaps; there are things that are going to be a venn diagram between all the standards, not just sustainability and a11y, but even security, web performance etc… we, in AGWG, when we write about images, we can write about image formats that are smaller in size, eg use webp, not jpg, etc

<tzviya> https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/#accessibility - a list of all the guidelines that relate to a11y

wendyreid: there are things like this where we can say 'pick the more sustainable option'

wendyreid: there's lots of opportunities for AGWG to work with sustainability when we have the opportunity to recommend the 'best option'

<Zakim> wendyreid, you wanted to note something like performance aids both a11y and sustainability

AlexDawson: one of the things we look at in WSG is guidelines that are good for people

AlexDawson: the guideline could look at the actual tooling itself and encourage toolmakers to create more digitally resilient and more energy efficient choices

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to content/tooling/org and to point to other standards

tzviya: we had a convo with someone in the group who works with the French (semi) regulatory body and talked about how to organise and how to measure. I like to organise based on… which are about content?

tzviya: would like some way of flagging things that makes it clear that we have different things that are being measured

JenStrickland: the impact we have in sustainability isn't very big when one person meets a requirement, one person stopping with AI use doesn't matter as much as 50k people. However for accessibility we do care about one person specifically, as accessibility is a human right.

JenStrickland: when we think about WSG, we talk near-term, mid-term and long-term, machine-testable, human-testable, etc. For prioritising we have to balance those sorts of decisions

JenStrickland: to measure impact, there's things like energy consumption, water consumption, e-waste management, carbon emission, resource extraction, material pollution, climate justice, supply chains etc

<Zakim> mgifford, you wanted to can we point to each other standards within our standards

JenStrickland: this to try and help explain what we do in WSG

<denisDIDIER> +1 JenStrickland : Sustainability is a common / mankind / planetary goal, accessibility is person / human being right

mgifford2: when I was doing the horizontal review for i18n, I found there's an opportunity to link to other standards

<elguerrero> +1 JenStrickland

<kevin> +1 to cross linking where it is appropriate... probably in methods

<Lisa> https://raw.githack.com/w3c/coga/research-modules-wd-1/issue-papers/Online-Safety-and-Wellbeing.html

Lisa: wanted to share something we're working on

Lisa: research paper from COGA TF

Lisa: focuses on safety and well being.

Lisa: our focus is on cognitive learning and mental health. May be a huge area of synergy

<morganm> Comment: Carbon footprint is a part of what its about but a big focus of our document is about design and and web development thats really good for whole teams thats comes with tooling up for accessibility. I really see so much in common and mutually supporting. The experiences are better, the products are better. I see the technical differences

<morganm> between keeping things clean and organized but the methods and goals really support.

Lisa: in the next version of the COGA guidance we're also linking to WCAG and other things

<Zakim> kevin, you wanted to talk about document environment and to respond on priority targets

<tzviya> We already have a relationships section: https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/#relationships

kevin: who do we target first, browser vendors or consumers? we found in AGWG over the years is to find high value targerts

<hdv> s/targrts/targets

kevin: a lot of WCAG targets content creators. We can't reach them all

kevin: it's easy to create content for the web, what we're asking them to do is not necessarily easier. If you have high value targets, eg browser vendors, that gives a bit shift

kevin: another point… if I'm training people, one of the first things I say is don't read WCAG… it's a standard. In addition there's an ecosystem of resources, that explain not just WCAG but accessibility in general, it gives people an easy on-ramp to accessibility

kevin: WCAG's primary target is evaluators, auditors. So where does the rec track document sit?

kevin: it's not the 200 reqs, it's the handholding

kevin: people have been switched off before because it is a complex document

kevin: it is technically challenging though

hdv: RE content ecosystem, that is great about WCAG, it is technically challenging. we talked about that this morning as well with the group that was there
… I think official guidance around sustainability that provides an on-ramp is a great idea

<tzviya> https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/#relationships

hdv: RE linking, we've sometimes removed some requirements from WSG because they're already in WCAG
… don't want multiple standards saying the same thing, I like cross-linking more

<elguerrero> +1 hdv

<kevin> +1 to requirements being in one place and linked

hdv: put things in the one standard they belong the most in

<Zakim> hdv, you wanted to comment on crossref

<denisDIDIER> Specification documents cover 2 different purposes: it stands as structured knowledge database + it serves as reference for assessment. Those are different levels and use cases

JenStrickland: I'm hearing a lot do this, do that, without checking if we did already.

<morganm> I dont know the current status of all of them but some wsg things are already ✂️ because they overlapped, there is so much room for growth!

<morganm> mutual collaboration etc.

JenStrickland: we have already covered a lot of what is suggested to us

tzviya: this is probably not the last time we meet with AGWG

<JenStrickland> individual vs cumulative impact

tzviya: re Jen's point on lense change… individual vs many. It's important to talk about how we can collaborate

tzviya: it would be good to talk about how we can improve our documents from regulatory perspective

<Zakim> morganm, you wanted to talk briefly about overlap

morganm: I'm very excited about accessibility and sustainability, there's a huge overlap between people. Want to emphasise that the work on improving the overlap isn't a big deal, I've already seen it happen from people on this call

<Zakim> kevin, you wanted to highlight that we are here to share what we have learned over the years

kevin: we're here to share learnings from WCAG over the years. In hindsight we would have probably done things differently

tzviya: in our group we talked about where we're heading with metrics, measurability. Do we want to hear more about assertions and how they may be useful?

fershad_: yes, about the balance between some things you can actually test and things you can't test

Rachael: one of the challenges of writing guidelines for adoption is that everything has to be really testable, so we have process we _know_ improve accessibility, with anecdotal evidence. User testing, plain language reviews using style guides etc. A lot of things we know can work and we want to give credits to

Rachael: but they aren't repeatable. So we are trusting people when they make an assertion, we're requiring they make a public claim, but the documentation or proof is up to them whether to share it or not, not required to make public. We realise that makes it easy for potential gaming, there's risk.

fershad_: we can park it for now, but I feel this is definitely something we can explore at a later stage

kevin: this is about giving credit for things we know are beneficial

kevin: there are a lot of things that are good to do, but they don't fit in a conformance model that is testable

wendyreid: someone asked about the conformance model to ask what was in foundational and what was in the rest… what I would like to happen in WCAG is the concept of 'prerequisites', a checklist of things when you have them, you are ready to start testing the requirement.

<hdv> +1 wendyreid

<elguerrero> +1 wendyreid

fershad_: we heard from feedback is people want to know 'what are the most impactful things we can do now?'

<Ben_Till1> In my day job, a common phrase of mine is "Ready to test"(™)

<wendyreid> +1 Ben_Till1

fershad_: there is something to say for ordering prioritisation

JenStrickland: something about the history of assertions that could be valuable for WSG. I'll bring that to the next WSG meeting

AlexDawson: re assertions I am afraid this transparancy leads to greenwashing. If we don't want people to claim things they claim that they aren't doing

AlexDawson: we already have an issue with that today

hdv: I guess assertions have potential to lead to greenwashing, I imagine this would also be a risk for accessibility, people can claim whatever they want
… I think our job would be to define assertions that are so cleverly formulated that it's hard to maneuver around it
… I do think it's helpful; there are things that are hard to measure or to fit into a conformance model

<Zakim> hdv, you wanted to support looking at assertions

<Zakim> Rachael, you wanted to say tagging

Rachael: for us, for assertions, we are still requiring certain requirements to be done in additions to the assertion

<JenStrickland> Assertions originally started as a different thing. A part of it was a "showing your work" that you did the thing you claim to have done in testing. The W3C group would not develop the "assertion" or "protocol." Rather, the entity would document how it did the testing that could often be more accessible than even meeting WCAG. So, it doesn't have

<JenStrickland> to lead to greenwashing for SWING/WSG.

Rachael: I wanted to call out tagging. We tag by POUR traditionally, but can also tag by Functional Need, User Need, etc. This helps represent the same requirements in different forms