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Re: The importance of landmarks to screen readers?

for

From: Mallory
Date: Mar 30, 2021 2:53AM

Steve said:
> The countless discussions we have had in this forum show that there is a massive problem with ambiguity, errors, omissions and contradictions.

3.0, from the bits I've seen, does not seem to help with this. With things like "passes alt text at x%" it feels even fuzzier, if that's possible.

I still think, since WCAG is being used as the basis for laws in more and more places (yet is not a judicial document) that maybe the a11y world needs its own "judicial system".

That is, specific instances of something are brought as a "case" to a "judge" and things like rulings can be made on things like "what does the text literally say" or "what is the spirit of this SC" etc. Later cases can refer to earlier cases and they can all be stored in one place where anyone can search to look things up; it would be as flexible as law interpretation (laws interpreted one way may a decade later be interpreted differently due to how stuff changes), and dates would be clear so people can see if they find a page stating x that it's immediately clear whether something more recent (y) has superceded it (just recently found a dev relying on information from 2013 about the vapourware known as the HTML5 Outline).

I'm an auditor for my work and have been doing accessicrap since ~2006 or so but I'm always going to be an "enthusiastic amateur". There are very, very few people I would use the term "expert" for and most of them have been spec editors... and as a spec editor I still would not necessarily consider them "experts" on the practical side (what are real authors and real users doing? What is more AT and similar software doing?).

Without something like the judicial-system setup, some decent majority of things like audits are going to be based on opinions without the backup of something like agreed-upon precedence or the arguments (as in a judge's final argument explaining why they ruled the way they did) as a reference beyond "well but we're all pretty sure the spec author *meant* this thing they didn't explicitly say" and other fluffy stuff.

cheers,
_mallory