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Re: Wcag 2.1

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From: John Foliot
Date: May 11, 2017 8:32AM

Hi All,

Birkir has done an excellent job summarizing the crux of the situation.

Laws are regional requirements, based upon geography and sovereignty,
where-as the W3C is a global consortium that has members from, quite
literally, countries all over the globe. Some territories explicitly
reference "WCAG 2.0", while other countries will possibly reference "the
most current requirements" (essentially the requirement in the UK today).
Other countries and territories will adapt WCAG but re-write their
legislation - Japan developed *JIS X 8341-3* using both the ISO/IEC Guide
71 and the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines, and in Canada, both the Quebec
and Ontario provincial governments have created legislation that uses WCAG,
but with specific exceptions. So there is not a homogeneous legal landscape
we work in today.

Also consider that while a number of proposed new Success Criteria are
coming forward, the Working Group at the W3C is working with a hard and
tight deadline to publish WCAG 2.1 (July 2018), and at this time it appears
that some of the current proposed new SC may not make the 2.1 "Finnish
line".

The plan there is to continue working on those SC that didn't make the
first deadline, and potentially offer a WCAG 2.2 roughly a year or 2 after
WCAG 2.1 ships. And if 2.2 still doesn't have everything we are working on
"completed", we have not ruled out a potential 2.3, 2.4, etc. at roughly
18-month/2-year cycles, which to many of us is the bigger key: regular and
predictable Recommendations that address the issues from a technology
perspective first.

Meanwhile, as Birkir noted, we are also taking a different tack, and
concurrent with the 'updating' of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,
the Working Group is *also* working on the next-generation guidelines
("Project Silver"). These guidelines will also look to incorporate some of
the existing requirements in UAAG (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines) and
ATAG (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines) to create a more holistic
"Accessibility Guidelines" going forward.

The actual format and structure of Silver is still an open question, and
while we will need to preserve the intent, and ensure a thorough mapping
from one to the other, we have specifically not ruled out the notion that
Project Silver may emerge in a different format than WCAG. There is also a
strong push to see the Project Silver work advance in a timely manner, and
so transitioning from a 2.x to the next-gen spec is also foreseen as
happening in a 2 to 5 year time-frame, but the crystal ball is a tad cloudy
here.


Returning to legislative requirements then, it is my personal belief that
most territories that reference a specific WCAG release will quite possibly
wait for the release of "Silver" before undertaking a legislative update,
while regions like the UK will likely be using 2.1 (2.x) sooner than that.

In all scenarios however, as advocates and consultants, we can urge our
clients/employers to start taking up WCAG 2.1 SC upon publication, because
while they won't be legally mandated right away, the "writing is on the
wall" that they will be eventually. The nice thing here is that the
guidance will be clear and "normative", but the timeline for implementation
will be easier to take-up: the trick is to socialize the new SC while they
still have the legal value of "Best Practice" with lesser pressure to
deliver, and more time to incorporate into the final web-offering of the
client/company.

HTH

JF

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 8:58 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> My understanding of WCAG 2.1 is that the new requirements )low vision,
> cognitive, mobile) success criteria will be optional (I think you can
> choose to comply with 1 or more of those), though I am not overly
> clear on the details.
>
> What I do know is that Section 508 was updated to references WCAG 2.0
> on January 18, 2017 (9 years after the WCAG 2.0 release, back then we
> did not even have an accessible touch screen device), and that the ADA
> does not reference WCAG 2.0 specifically, which has caused headaches,
> chaos and endless amount of corporate accessibility policy debate all
> over the nation. In Europe we started campaigning for the EU
> Accessibility Directive in 2011 and it came through in late 2016
> referncing WCAG 2.0 with compliance coming into effective starting
> 2018.
> So, seriously, even if 2.1 becomes an official standard in 2018 or
> 2019, there will be another 3 to 5 years (spoken as an unrealistic
> optimist) before that standard is likely to be referenced by an
> official legislation, more likely 6 to 8 years.
> WE are all aware that we need more agile standards and legislation to
> address technological progress, and it is one of the big talking
> points of WCAG 3.0 (or WCAG AG, nicknamed silver).
> Making corporate accessibility policies reference WCAG 2.0 is huge,
> and the priority for now, I would say. Asking them to do more and
> prefer for a new standard may be too much for the legal team.
> You can review the 2.1 success cirteria with the designers, developers
> and content folks and dress them up as usability improvements and
> possible extras.
>
>
>
> On 5/11/17, Tim Harshbarger < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > My understanding is that when WCAG 2.1 becomes a technical
> recommendation,
> > there isn't any requirement for laws to update to that version. That
> will be
> > up to whatever political entities have the legislative power to change
> the
> > laws.
> >
> > Also, by the time WCAG 2.1 is close to becoming an official
> recommendation,
> > it will not be undergoing any more changes. However, I expect for most
> > political entities, they will want to wait until the specification is
> > completed before they look into altering their laws to incorporate it.
> While
> > WCAG 2.1 has a timeline, that is just the plan--and few plans survive
> > contact with reality.
> >
> > I am sure we have people on this list more fully involved with W3C and
> the
> > process of creating WCAG 2.1 that can give better and more accurate
> > information--but that is my understanding of things--well, my last
> comment
> > about when laws might be updated is more an opinion about how legislative
> > bodies are likely to react.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Tim
> >
> >