Email: ITI Comments on First Public Working Draft of W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 (6 - Sampling Critical Errors)

[jspellman]

Comment from Email:
from PDF

• Inclusion of a compliance level or mechanism that would accept a very small minority of pages having one or more “critical errors” on them, while still achieving a minimum compliance bar. Doing so would align WCAG with the real-world tradeoffs that businesses have to make every day with a balance of time-to-market with similarly critical non-accessibility bugs that may prevent a specific feature from being used by all users, or by users using certain devices, or from certain geographies, or some other subset – which are then fixed quicky, post-release/publish. We believe this is particularly important for the very largest and most dynamic of websites and web applications, which are undergoing continuous updates, and which at any given moment in time almost certainly have some number of significant issues appearing somewhere on their site, somewhere within the application.

[jspellman]

Thank you for your comment. Project members are working on your comment. You may see discussion in the comment thread and we may ask for additional information as we work on it. We will mark the official response when we are finished and close the issue.

[slauriat]

Proposed Response:

Definitely a complex area to work through! We have some work started that could include or at least affect this kind of scenario in the conformance model work, as well as other areas like with accessibility maturity model and supporting documentation like WCAG-EM-style guidance on how large organizations and bug service level objectives (SLOs) can factor into conformance. The accessibility maturity model could take into account things like the existence of bug SLOs, tracking mechanisms, and other aspects of this, for instance.

All a bit of a response to say that we definitely want to ensure that large organizations and large/complex sites & apps have good support through WCAG 3 and the conformance model that we arrive at, but we haven't yet figured out what exactly that'll look like and which aspect of WCAG 3 will cover which part of the problem space. As we do move forward with this work, we'll bring it to key stakeholders like you to proactively get feedback on the direction and approach.