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Re: WCAG - Fail or not to - Static text tab-focusable in tables

for

From: Mallory
Date: Jan 4, 2021 1:40AM

Steve,
>In what possible way is it hurtful to achieve AA conformance?

Birkir answered what I would have said: the example WCAG compliant page with the billion Tab stops is harmful to real people, but passes WCAG. If a client hired me to say that I'd go find them someone with less soul left over to do it instead. There's a place for lawyers who can get their clients off serious charges based on technicalities (the system of the law has to work), but I'd rather not be the one to do it.

You may be thinking of clients who are so awful qua accessibility that even a WCAG audit improves them. This can be true. However many of these are the clients who argue on every point to claim why they don't have to, or make "fixes" that are awful but are now improved enough that you can't in good conscious fail them on that SC anymore (let's say, going from zero keyboard accessibility, a clear fail, to a dynamically-added tabindex=0 to every element, even though that's not what you recommended). They are also the repeat customers, coming back every 6 months or year to have another audit, only to show that they not only invented their own changes but have nothing systemic to keep fixes viable and they get poor scores every time. Sometimes it seems the legal requirement is simply "we recently had a WCAG AA audit" rather than actually fix anything. I only have so many years to live, yo, and I'd like to keep my remaining hairs on my head.

After a lot of thinking, I think I know what this is. Someone I know (a developer) has been running into this at his work as well. A company says "we want to be accessible!" or "accessibility is important to us!" but it turns out what that means is the same thing as "we care about children starving in Africa! We believe that's horrible!" I think a lot of developers have this too. They want, in a generalised foggy way, to be what they consider or were told to be good, but they don't know what that means in a practical manner.
Once they see it, the specific things they need to do, the ideal starts having a cost. This quickly turns into a "let's see what's literally, minimally required by us" check. So where my developer friend worked, it turned out that the company went and checked how compliant they needed to be and discovered that their company is *explicitly named in the nation's accessibility law* as being exempted (even though they receive government funding). Once they discovered that, it was back to "accessibility is important, but our pasty branding colours on links is even more important." And so this is the state of that software today (in 2025 the law will adjust and they'll also have to comply, but I see them doing it like a cat struggling to not get dunked into a bathtub).

And yes, I know people out there advertising services who would know they could pass a billion-Tab-stop page ("it's keyboard accessible, after all!"). They recommend setting overly-verbose aria-labels on everything and don't know best practice techniques, but none of those things fail WCAG. They're (probably) cheaper than I am. Better for the law-abiding client; now they're paying less.

(Where are these people? I tend to find them because they message me on LinkedIn/email offering their services, lol. I'm not saying they're amazing and agree some are insufficient, but I mean, WCAG is a basement-bare minimum, not rocket surgery.)

cheers,
_mallory

On Sun, Jan 3, 2021, at 3:04 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> I totally agree that audit context is important. My initial reply to
> this list highlighting that sometimes I can fail things for my company
> without mapping it to a specific WCAG success criterion speaks to my
> employer's commitment to an accessible and usable experience, so it
> was just a note of appreciation for that. I spent years as a
> consultant strictly auditing to WCAG, and part of the reason I
> switched jobs was the opportunity to stop so heavily focusing on WCAG
> and starting to focus on accessibility/ax (accessible experience).
> WCAG 2.1 AA is still the standard, but if I come across serious AX
> problems I can record and assign severity based on our assessment of
> the user impact.
>
> I still have to say that if you can make tens or hundreds of static
> webpage elements keyboard focusable without failing a WCAG success
> criterion, then WCAG is broken in that regard and this is something
> that needs to be fixed. I may have to look at filing an issue against
> WCAG 3.0 to have this looked into.
>
>
> I would still fail this under either success criterion 2.1.2.,
> keyboard trap (if it's near impossible to get past the static elements
> in the table with the tab key this constitutes a keyboard trap) or
> 2.4.3 (I don't see how sending focus to dozens of non-focusable and
> non-operable elements preserves meaning and operation, especially
> operation).
> Again, it's all about context, if the table has a "skip past table"
> link this wouldn't apply. If the table is only in one location and
> there's nothing operable after it (safe, perhaps the footer), it
> probably would not be more than a minor to moderate impact. It also
> depends on the number of static focusable elements, is it 1, 10, 100,
> or hundreds?
> Also it depends if the page is a static/public page or whether it is
> located behind a session where you can literally time out while
> tabbing through the static elements, in that case the keyboard trap
> argument becomes pretty strong.
> So, context, context, context. Accessibility would not be a legitimate
> and respected industry without a standard, and WCAG has done miracles,
> but it's technology agnostic nature that makes it so powerful and
> flexible can sometimes present confusion and inconsistencies between
> experts, because interpretation is required.
> And that, folks, is why this WebAIM mailing list is so great. I love
> reading all the points of view and I never stop learning. I may
> occasionally disagree with some posts but I never fail to appreciate
> the thoughts and I have often changed my mind after reading all the
> awesome discussions on here.
> Cheers
>
>
>
> On 1/2/21, Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > " Yet another reason to avoid performing "WCAG audits". I believe they're
> > hurtful, and clients who want to only stick to it are cheaper served by any
> > fly-by-night "a11y experts"."
> >
> > I don't often disagree with you, but that's absolute nonsense. The reality
> > is that the vast majority of organisations are only interested in legal
> > compliance. That can mean different things in different countries. For US
> > organisations that are covered by Section 508, it means conformance with
> > WCAG 2.0 rather than 2.1. In the UK, all public sector organisations must
> > meet WCAG 2.1, but there are exceptions for certain types of content.
> >
> > In what possible way is it hurtful to achieve AA conformance? If you're
> > suggesting that level AA isn't enough, then where do you draw the line and
> > why? It's always possible to do more, so any line is arbitrary and it's a
> > matter of diminishing returns after that.
> >
> > And the idea that there are "fly-by-night a11y experts" who can competently
> > test for WCAG conformance is wishful thinking. In the UK there are probably
> > no more than 10 testing companies and a handful of freelancers who can
> > conduct a WCAG audit competently. It's really, really difficult and takes
> > many thousands of hours of study and experience. Most of the test reports I
> > have seen from other organisations and freelancers are very poor. Of course
> > there are some notable exceptions in this forum.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> >