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Re: Fixing WAI's writing styleDoes WCAG require ...

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From: Bourne, Sarah (ITD)
Date: Nov 25, 2015 7:03AM

On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Chaals McCathie Nevile < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> TL;DR: You need to make concrete proposals for changes to text,
> because WAI cannot just hire a writer to fix stuff for you. So file
> bugs against WCAG.

Maybe it's because there are so many horrible things happening in the world right now, but that statement fills me with despair. I can't even imagine filing bug reports to change the writing style of such a large set of huge documents. You really want a (talented) editor to oversee the process and make stylistic decisions that would be applied uniformly across the body of text.

And I'm not sure such an approach would end up making an appreciable difference. There are some things that may not be able to change, too. For instance, "normative" and "nonnormative" have very specific meanings in spec-speak and cause non-fluent speakers of that dialect to run away screaming.

It might be easier and more feasible to consider a plain language user guide for authors and developers, which would be nonnormative (I presume) but more approachable. WebAIM does quite a bit of this for us, and there are other resources as well, but none have the imprimatur of the W3C.

> because WAI cannot just hire a writer to fix stuff for you.
Do we need a Kickstarter campaign? [cynical yet impish grin]

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility, MassIT
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.mass.gov/MassIT