Conformance Short Summary Strawdog

Goals of the Conformance Model

To create something that

1. Will get web designers to look beyond, and go beyond (do beyond), what has been able to be put into WCAG 2.2
   • Especially the areas of cognitive, language, and learning disabilities
2. Will be accepted by other regulatory and standards groups
   • So it can be cited in other standards
   • So it can be used in regulations
   • So it can be adopted as an ISO standard as WCAG 2.x is
3. That differentiates between what an organization has influence over and what they do not
4. That ensures that pages, parts or steps that are part of a process are not classified as conforming if the process is not
5. That something that fails technically, but which does not have any real world impact on the lives of people with disabilities, can still conform. Also some way to report what does conform if every single bit is does not conform.
6. That recognizes that something that conforms is not necessarily (actually is never) accessible to all. It only meets a standard of accessibility that consensus has been reached.
7. That it be as simple as possible to make it more understandable.

(We should review this report https://www.w3.org/community/silver/draft-final-report-of-silver/ to see if the underlying motivation for any of the many things listed are not covered in one of the motivations listed above? )

Proposal

• That there be three different levels of conformance.
  • Rationale: Three is a magic number. More levels (than 2) give more ability for people to reach higher, but 4 levels starts to get complicated.
• The three levels be called Bronze, Silver, and Gold
  • Rationale: with A AA AAA it is not clear which is best. Bronze also sounds like you just barely got a medal - and everyone wants to be better than bronze.
• That Bronze conformance provisions all be objective and testable
  • (Objective and testable = high inter-evaluator agreement)
  • Rationale
    • So that the base level of conformance will meet the standard for other standards organizations for normative provisions.
    • So that regulatory bodies can adopt it a minimum required level - because it is testable so is legally enforceable.
• That Silver can also include things that otherwise cannot make it into required parts of WCAG (A and AA) and include things like assertions that people have "considered" or "worked on" or did "best effort" to do things that are not objectively testable
  • Rationale: There are important things that go beyond what is 'objective' and that by using ’assertions' can include many more things - and an assertion is actually testable (that they made the assertion) so can easily be used in a conformance
  • Scoring can also be introduced at this level — where authors do not need to meet all provisions
• That Gold include processes and things that are harder to do
  • Rationale: Some things are hard for some places to do but that would make a big difference in actual usability of sites by people with disabilities. For example user testing - which is not objective but is a very effective strategy for making sites more accessible - with more testing by more people with more types, degrees and combinations of disability and technical skill resulting in ever more accessible sites.
• That for any sites that constitute a process (e.g. shopping), no pages in the process are considered conforming if the entire process is not conformant.
  • Rationale: it makes no sense to say that a site is accessible or that all pages are accessible except for X if X blocks meaningful use of the other pages.
• That exceptions or exemptions to provisions be specified in the specific guidelines/success criteria and that they be based on technical or feasibility or security considerations.
  • Rationale: Blanket exemptions end up exempting sites from provisions that are not a problem for them because another provision would be a problem. Also allows more
• That the "author" of content (the entity conforming) be constrained to those who are authoring the page or who can control what appears on the page
  • Rationale: Email services can not control what is put into each email that appears on their site. Companies that contract for all or part of a page to be authored for them can include provisions in content for accessibility. We need to separate the two cases.
  • (We will have long discussions to determine where to draw the line in the spectrum between these two. But we need to recognize both cases and then work to define where "control" of content exists or not. OR we can recognize the two cases and allow others (regulatory for example) to draw the line. Or perhaps we can recommend a line or have different lines at different conformance levels.