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Notification of changes to the WCAG Understanding pages

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 20, 2022 12:35AM

Does anyone know if there is any way of being notified of changes to the WCAG Understanding pages (and ideally all the other related pages)?

I know that these pages are not normative, but we rely heavily on them and I think it's pretty poor that they can be changed frequently, without notice, and that they do not even contain a "last modified" date or changelog.

For instance, I was recently discussing the "Focus Visible" success criterion with a colleague, and I knew that the Understanding page said that the flashing insertion point (the caret) in a textbox acts as a focus indicator. However, when I went to https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible, the page does not contain the word "caret".

Archive.org shows that on 04 July 2019 the page did refer to the caret:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190704230301/https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible

The "Intent" section of that page was then changed at least 4 times in less than 3 years, with the word "caret" being removed, reappearing and being removed again! Compare these versions:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200503214256/https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible

https://web.archive.org/web/20210405214106/https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible

https://web.archive.org/web/20211105043029/https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible

https://web.archive.org/web/20220428011223/https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible

These changes potentially undermine us if we have quoted the Understanding to clients to justify our test results. I am going to have to set up a monitoring service to get notifications of future changes, but that really shouldn't be necessary.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
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