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From: Ramakrishnan Subramanian
Date: Sun, Feb 13 2022 9:55PM
Subject: ACS for WCAG 2.1 alone
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Hi,
We have got a client requirement to prepare ACS report for their
website that is recently tested only against WCAG 2.1 requirements
alone excluding 2.0 requirements. Their website was already tested for
WCAG 2.0 requirements couple of Years ago.
I have the following queries regarding this scenario.
Can we prepare ACR for WCAG 2.1 alone excluding 2.0?
Since the given website is not tested for 2.0 recently, should we
recommend to test against all the WCAG requirements including 2.0 if
they look for conformance?
If it is ok to prepare ACS for 2.1  alone, what should be mentioned in
the comment's column for 2.0 SC's?
What is the industry practice on such scenarios?


--

Thanks and Regards
Ramakrishnan

From: glen walker
Date: Mon, Feb 14 2022 10:13AM
Subject: Re: ACS for WCAG 2.1 alone
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(Side note for those new to accessibility. Technically a VPAT (voluntary
product accessibility template) is just the "template" of your report.
It's a blank document with sections for your results. Once you fill in all
the information and publish it, it's called an ACR (accessibility
conformance report). However, it's common practice (whether correct or
not) to call a filled out report a VPAT. So if you have a client or if
your company asks you to generate a VPAT, and then someone else asks about
an ACR, don't sweat it. As accessibility professionals we should use the
right terminology but if someone interchanges the words, as long as you
know what they're talking about, it's ok.)

A VPAT/ACR can really be anything you want it to be. The main purpose is
to give a general idea of how well a product or website conforms to various
accessibility guidelines. The results might be based on WCAG or Section
508 or EN 301 549 or AODA or any other country's accessibility
requirements.

So the answer to your question on whether you can have an ACR *just* for
the WCAG 2.1 guidelines is "yes", because you can do whatever you want for
the ACR. *Should* you do that? I would never recommend it. The key is
your statement that the WCAG 2.0 ACR was done "a couple years ago". Way
too much stuff can change in that timeframe. Even if you had an ACR from a
few months ago, most websites change daily/weekly/monthly so anything you
tested previously could be out of date. A developer, designer, content
author might have inadvertently broken something that used to pass.

How often you do a full re-test in order to create the ACR depends on how
often the website is being updated. If it's a fairly static sight (not
very common), then you might be able to generate an ACR every year. If you
have major changes every few months, then perhaps a 6-month ACR should be
done. Either way, it should be a full ACR of all of WCAG. Is that
required? No. You can do small addendums like you asked about. I just
don't recommend that.

(I suppose the only time I'd do an addendum is if a full WCAG 2.0 ACR was
generated "recently", but even then, I'd include all the 2.0 results in the
new 2.1 report. No one wants to hunt for the conformance results in
multiple documents.)


On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 9:56 PM Ramakrishnan Subramanian <
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:

> Hi,
> We have got a client requirement to prepare ACS report for their
> website that is recently tested only against WCAG 2.1 requirements
> alone excluding 2.0 requirements. Their website was already tested for
> WCAG 2.0 requirements couple of Years ago.
> I have the following queries regarding this scenario.
> Can we prepare ACR for WCAG 2.1 alone excluding 2.0?
> Since the given website is not tested for 2.0 recently, should we
> recommend to test against all the WCAG requirements including 2.0 if
> they look for conformance?
> If it is ok to prepare ACS for 2.1 alone, what should be mentioned in
> the comment's column for 2.0 SC's?
> What is the industry practice on such scenarios?
>
>
> --
>
> Thanks and Regards
> Ramakrishnan
> > > > >

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Mon, Feb 14 2022 10:34AM
Subject: Re: ACS for WCAG 2.1 alone
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WCAG 2.1 is a superset of WCAG 2.0 which means everything in WCAG 2.0 is part of WCAG 2.1. So only reporting against WCAG 2.1 SCs that are additional to WCAG 2.0 SCs is not reporting WCAG 2.1 but only a very small subset of it. If you want to present a WCAG 2.1 ACR based on a 2 year old assessment of the SCs common to both 2.0 and 2.1 plus a recent assessment of the SCs that are only in 2.1, then I think that's fine. But you should make this clear in the Notes section by clearly stating when the two parts of the assessment were carried out and what each one covered. At worst, it's only like having a 2 year old ACR which may be a little out of date. It's a bit better than that though because at least some of it is more up to date. Any ACR immediately starts becoming out of date when you make the first substantive accessibility change after its publication so it's not unusual for ACRs to lag a bit behind the current state of the product. If anything, you're only underrepresenting the accessibility (assuming it has been improved in the last 2 years).

Mark