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Results of Questionnaire Making Content Usable Wide Review Second Survey

The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.

This questionnaire was open from 2020-05-20 to 2020-06-02.

10 answers have been received.

Jump to results for question:

Wide Review

1. Wide Review

Are you comfortable with this document moving forward to a wide review under the banner of the Working Group?

Summary

Choice	All responders
Choice	Results
Yes, move to wide review	4
Yes, with the following changes	5
No, for the following reasons	1

Details

Responder	Wide Review	Comments
David MacDonald	Yes, with the following changes	The suggested edits I provided in the previous survey were partially implemented but not substantially. If they were adopted it would have addressed my concerns. However, with only minor adoption of the edits, I remain concerned that this document will be perceived as fully vetted by the working group. During 2.1 these patterns were presented as SCs. The WG determined that they could not be included in the normative standard. So without the edits I suggested, I believe it may be confusing that we are now presenting these patterns as a "supplement" to WCAG. I'm afraid some jurisdictions will take that as a signal to require them in law and policy. Here's another example: "...The Objectives and Patterns presented here supplement the Success Criteria presented in the WCAG accessibility guidelines and address those user needs that are not fully met in accessibility guidelines...." Definition of "supplement" = something that completes or enhances something else when added to it. This may be interpreted as a WCAG Extension. How about this: "...The Objectives and Patterns presented here are not intended to replace or add requirements to the WCAG accessibility guidelines. They are patterns that could not be included in the normative WCAG 2.x specification and are intended as advice to help address user needs that may not be met otherwise..." I want to see these patterns out there and read, but I'm nervous about them being presented as a WG note without clear light of day between this document and the normative document.
Lisa Seeman-Horwitz	Yes, move to wide review	To me the changes are the borderline of what is acceptable as a compromise.
Laura Carlson	Yes, with the following changes	Agree with David's suggested text to change the current: "...The Objectives and Patterns presented here supplement the Success Criteria presented in the WCAG accessibility guidelines and address those user needs that are not fully met in accessibility guidelines...." To something such as: "...The Objectives and Patterns presented here are not intended to replace or add requirements to the WCAG accessibility guidelines. They are patterns that could not be included in the normative WCAG 2.x specification and are intended as advice to help address user needs that may not be met otherwise..."
Bruce Bailey	Yes, with the following changes	Please incorporate David or Laura suggested edit per this survey.
Abi James	Yes, move to wide review
Rachael Bradley Montgomery	Yes, move to wide review	The COGA taskforce suggests the following wording change to address David and Laura's comments about "supplement": ORIGINAL: "...The Objectives and Patterns presented here supplement the Success Criteria presented in the WCAG accessibility guidelines and address those user needs that are not fully met in accessibility guidelines...." PROPOSED CHANGE: "The Objectives and resulting Patterns presented here are not intended to replace or add requirements to the WCAG accessibility guidelines. Rather, they are intended to address user needs that may not otherwise be met so that more people with disabilities can use websites and applications. This guidance is not included in the current normative WCAG 2.x specification. " Below is a list of David's suggested changes from the previous review and what was done to address them. Since the changes were not always identical to the suggestions, it may be easier to review them together in a list. Items that were not changed after discussion at COGA are preceded by an . 1. SUGGESTION: For each pattern there is a "Success" example and a "Failure" example. I don't think we should have a "failure" example. Instead call it "unsuccessful" CHANGE: Changed examples to Do or Don't 2. CURRENT: ... It gives advice on how to make content usable for people with learning and cognitive disabilities. ... SUGGESTED: It gives advice on how to make content <add>more</add> usable for people with learning and cognitive disabilities. CHANGE: This change was not made as COGA was concerned that softening the langauge in this way plays into the implicit bias that the barriers for people with cognitive disabilities are lower than those for people with other disabilities. 3. CURRENT: People with cognitive disabilities often use add-ons or extensions as assistive technology. SUGGESTED: People with cognitive disabilities <remove>often<remove> <add>may</add> use add-ons or extensions as assistive technology. *CHANGE: This change was not made as COGA felt the language was factually accurate since the add-ons include spell checkers and other common technology. 4. CURRENT: People with cognitive and learning disabilities may not be able to effectively use web content because of the design and content choices of the author. SUGGESTED: Design and content choices can impact usage in ways that make it difficult or impossible for some people with cognitive and learning disabilities. CHANGE: Changed this to "Poor design, structure and language choices can make content inaccessible to people with learning disabilities. 5. CURRENT: However, for users with cognitive and learning disabilities, these difficulties are likely to be persistent and significant, so that they are unable to access content and may be forced to abandon tasks, without any way to complete them unaided. SUGGESTED: However, for users with cognitive and learning disabilities, these difficulties are likely to be persistent and significant, so that they may not be able to complete some of these tasks unaided. CHANGE: Changed this to: " However, for users with cognitive and learning disabilities, these difficulties are likely to be persistent and significant. As a result, they could be unable to access content and complete these tasks independently." 6. CURRENT: People may also experience a co-occurrence of difficulties such as dyspraxia / developmental coordination difficulties and ADHD should also be taken into account. SUGGESTED: People may also experience a co-occurrence of difficulties such as dyspraxia / developmental coordination difficulties. People with ADHD may also be helped by some of these techniques. CHANGE: Changed this to: "People may also experience more than one type of cognitive and learning disability." 7. CURRENT: Accessibility has traditionally focused on the making the user interface usable for people with sensory and physical impairments in vision, hearing and/or mobility. Some accessibility features that help these user groups also help people with cognitive impairments. People with cognitive and learning disabilities also need improvements to context, language, usability, and other more general factors that impact everyone to some degree. As a result, they do not fit well into traditional accessibility standards. SUGGESTED: There have been difficulties including requirements for people with cognitive disabilities in accessibility standards for the following reasons: (1) Large variance of individual needs in multiple sub categories of user groups (2) Lack of mature assistive technology for the consumption of web content by people with cognitive disabilities (3) Lack of peer reviewed research for users with cognitive disabilities using the web (4) Difficult to establish consistent test results from manual and/or automated evaluation (4) Difficult to identify solutions that scale across technologies in multiple languages. (5) People with cognitive and learning disabilities need improvements to context, language, usability, and other more general factors that impact everyone to some degree, and its difficult to measure the degree of disproportionate usability by people with cognitive disabilities and to test for these things. As a result, some of the needs of people with cognitive disabilities do not fit well into accessibility standards. In WCAG 2 and 2.1 there are many Success Criteria that help people with cognitive disabilities but there are also some gaps due to the reasons above. CHANGE: Similar wording was in two places. We removed this wording from the design guide introduction and changed the wording in the introduction to:"Traditionally, accessibility focused on making the interface usable for people with sensory and physical impairments (vision, hearing and/or mobility). Some accessibility features will help people with cognitive impairments, but often the issues that affect people with cognitive and learning disabilities are about context, structure, language, usability, and other factors that are difficult to include in general guidance." 8. SUGGESTION: Add a sentence near the top (probably in the status) something like, "This note is intended as helpful advice rather than an extension to WCAG requirements. Specifically, WCAG as a standard is independent of the suggestions in this document and this document has no impact on WCAG conformance. CHANGE: Updated abstract, reordered document and added langugage to the design guide to make the distinction clearer. 9. SUGGESTION: In the "objective" sections, I don't think we should have links to Github WCAG pull requests and issues with all the comments and internal disagreements, etc... maybe move these SC proposals out. CHANGE: Removed 10. SUGGESTION: There is a list of about 35 Success Criteria that were not included in WCAG 2.1 because they didn't meet WCAG acceptance criteria. I think these may need some sort of qualifier. CHANGE: Removed 11. SUGGESTION: The table in "Guidance for policy makers" has WCAG Success Criteria acceptance characteristics status for these above 35 SCs which basically says every one of the SCs meets every one of the acceptance Criteria we had for 2.1. I suggest this table would need a full revision before inclusion https://raw.githack.com/w3c/coga/changes-after-0327/content-usable/index.html#appendix-guidance-for-policy-makers RATIONALE: I don't think we should compare disabilities against one another. It may be perceived as divisive by people in those groups. CHANGE:Removed 12. SUGGESTION: Provide clear language that states the relationship with WCAG up front that it doesn't add to the requirements WCAG CHANGE: Updated abstract, reordered document and added langugage to the design guide to make the distinction clearer. 13.SUGGESTION: Remove links to WCAG Github issues and pull requests CHANGE: Removed 14. SUGGESTION: remove or amend the table which says all the previously unaccepted WCAG SCs meet all the SC Acceptance criteria CHANGE: Removed
John Kirkwood	Yes, move to wide review	Yes, move to wide review per Rachel Montgomery COGA TF proposed changes.
Alastair Campbell	Yes, with the following changes	The following 3 items are strongly recommended: 1) The do/don't thing has lead to many instances of non-english, e.g. "Don't: Headings do not clarify the steps". Suggest perhaps Use and Avoid? E.g. - "Use: Headings that tell me where I am - Avoid: Headings do not clarify the steps in a form." Ideally most "avoid" sentences would need an additional that, e.g. "Headings that do not...", but even without 'that' it would make more sense. 2) Can we improve the alt text? I looked at the one under Visual Cues, almost identical for two different images. Should be something like: "Two blue squares containing white circles. The blue backgrounds make two groupings visually apparent." "Two blue boxes containing different types of circle. The border acts as a separator." 3) In the "Appendix: Considerations for Uptake in Different Contexts and Policies", don't use 'must' in "User considerations must also be taken", use 'should', or something like "It is important to consider..." The following items are suggested: a) Re-ordering the bullets in the abstract to match the new document order. I think that would be: - people with learning and cognitive disabilities, - aims and objectives for useable content, - design patterns (ways) to make content usable, - including users in design and testing activities, and - personas (examples) and user needs. b) Can we tidy up the images in the summary? (Check with Michael) E.g. #summary li img { float: left; margin: 0 0.3em 0.5em 0; } #summary li { clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; } c) The intro (2) finishes one paragraph with "difficult to include in general guidance." and starts the next with "This document aims to provide guidance". I think we need a different word, how about "difficult to include in guidelines ." d) There is an odd editors note in A7, "Mental health and avoiding triggers is not yet fully supported. ". 1. Is everything else 'fully supported'? 2. Mental health isn't mentioned as something that is explicitly covered anyway, so why the note? (In the intro it is mentioned as "easier to use for everyone, including people who are experiencing stress or mental health issues." Unless it can be made clearer, suggest removing it.
Andrew Kirkpatrick	Yes, with the following changes	It doesn't seem that any changes have been made to the Appendix C. I agree with the change David suggested but also: 1) In Appendix C: "Review the different design pattern criteria, which are listed in the following table, and decide if they are relevant to the environmental or situational scenarios." - there is no following table 2) Same comment for sub-bullet on #1 above. 3) In Appendix C: "Critical Services: A policy for critical services might require any design pattern with a medium to high user need level, as reflected in the table of design patterns and policy criteria." - the "table of design patterns and policy criteria" is linked from this and there is no indication in the link or on the page it links to that this is not guidance that the Working Group has reached agreement on. I suggest making the link "table of design patterns and policy criteria (draft)" and then also adding a statement at the top of the google doc that is linked along the lines of "Publication as Draft document by the Cognitive Accessibility Task Force does not imply endorsement by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group or the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress." 4) Second paragraph of the Appendix C includes: "(In contrast conformance to The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is required by law in many countries, and is designed to enable clear conformance and wide applicability for all web content.)" - first, the word clear should be removed as it doesn't make sense here. Second, saying "enable conformance for all web content" is odd. Perhaps, "and is designed to be widely applicable to and allow conformance by all web content."?
Judy Brewer	No, for the following reasons	It is good to see the continued improvements in the document. With regard to comments I have made on previous versions, I appreciate the mention of supplemental guidance in the abstract, but think that that needs more clarification. Likewise the section on uptake of this guidance in different situations is improved, but it could use more -- potentially a sentence or two of that text could be used in the abstract to clarify applicability. Overall, anything to trim the document would increase uptake chances.