Explainer for W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0

The creation process for the guidelines should:

• Actively recruit a diverse range of people with disabilities. Review and monitor whether people are included. Periodically evaluate inclusive features of available tooling and procedures.
• Facilitate global participation and feedback.

• Support the needs of a wide range of people with disabilities and recognize that people have individual and multiple needs.
• Be flexible enough to support the needs of people with disabilities and keep up with emerging technologies. The information structure allows guidance to be added or removed.
• Be written in plain language, as easy as possible to understand. We need a definition of plain language that includes the ease of translation. Ideally, it will be a broadly accepted definition internationally.
• Improve the ability to support automated testing where appropriate and provide a procedure for repeatable tests when manual testing is appropriate.
• Be data-informed and evidence-based where possible. We recognize that research and evidence are influenced by the number of people with a particular disability, by the size of the body of research, and by the difficulty in capturing data regarding some disabilities or combination of disabilities. The intent is to make informed decisions wherever possible to ensure that the needs of all people with disabilities are prioritized, including needs that differ from the majority. In situations where there is no evidence or research, valid data-gathering methods should be used to obtain and evaluate information from advocacy groups, people with lived experience and other subject matter experts.
• Be written so the Guideline content is usable in adaptable and customizable ways. For example, Silver content is available to be extracted by users to adapt to their needs.

The goals are based on the Silver research, the results from the Silver Design Sprint, and input from the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, the Silver Task Force and the Silver Community Group.

• Better align conformance with the experiences of people with disabilities, and keep in mind that people with different disabilities have different experiences.
• Treat the needs of all disabilities equitably.
• Support a measurement and conformance structure that includes guidance for a broad range of disabilities. This includes more attention to the needs of low vision and cognitive accessibility, whose needs may not fit the true/false statement success criteria of WCAG 2.x.
• Consider the needs of more organizations.
• Be user-oriented instead of page-oriented. Think about what the person is trying to do.
• Wherever possible, preserve the organization’s investment in training, tooling, and knowledge.
• Support the ability for organizations to choose parts of their site or product for conformance (a logical subset of a site or product).
• Create a more flexible conformance model that addresses the challenges in applying the 2.x conformance model to large, complex, or dynamic websites and web applications.
  • Help organizations prioritize things that have a greater impact on improving the experience of people with disability.
  • Develop a more flexible method of measuring conformance that is better suited to accommodate dynamic or more regularly updated content.
• Reduce the burden of “accessibility supported” as an author responsibility, and help developers of authoring tools, browsers, and assistive technologies learn the behaviors that users expect of their products. Note: This goal originated as a suggestion from the Silver Design Sprint. It requires more detailed discussion in AGWG. It does not yet have consensus.
• Improve tests so that repeated tests get more consistent results.
• Increase the ability to create more automated tests so that the cost of accessibility test could potentially be reduced.
• Where possible, do not increase the manual accessibility testing burden.

Figure 1 shows the core structure of WCAG 3.0. WCAG 3.0 has three levels of content with associated documentation. Guidelines form the top level. Each guideline contains multiple outcomes, with associated critical errors and outcomes scoring. Each outcome contains multiple methods, with an associated description and examples, tests, and test scoring.

The development of WCAG 3 guidelines starts with functional needs. A functional need is a statement that describes a specific gap in one’s ability, or a specific mismatch between ability and the designed environment or context. Functional needs are applied to specific topics (for example: contrast, forms, readability, and more) to identify the barriers experienced by people with disabilities. The barriers in these topics inform the outcomes, which state the conditions to test whether the functional needs have been met. Functional needs are documented in the how-tos, supplementary material accompanying the guidelines.

Functional categories of disabilities group the functional needs of users with disabilities. Functional categories are used when reporting test results in the optional conformance claim.

Functional categories are similar to functional performance criteria in Section 508 [508-criteria] and functional performance statements in en 301 549 [en-301-549]. The current list of functional categories is:

• Vision and Visual
• Hearing and Auditory
• Sensory Intersections
• Mobility
• Motor
• Physical and Sensory Intersections
• Speech
• Attention
• Language and Literacy
• Learning
• Memory
• Executive
• Mental Health
• Cognitive and Sensory Intersections

The core structure has inter-relationships with supporting documents and the scoring process. Functional needs inform user needs (captured in the How-To), outcomes, and functional categories. The tests within methods are used to inform the scores for each outcome. Then outcome scores are aggregated to create scores by functional category and an overall score. These then result in a bronze rating. Silver and gold ratings build on the bronze rating to demonstrate improved accessibility. General information about guidelines is available in How-To documents.

WCAG 3 has an optional scoring system that can better inform organizations on the quality of their accessibility effort. The optional conformance levels provide a way for organizations to report their conformance in simple manner. The bronze level is based on the score in each functional category and the overall score. Silver and gold levels require conforming at the bronze level plus additional improved usability for people with disabilities.

• Essential functions vary by industry -- gaming will be different than e-commerce. We can't say what has to be tested, the organization needs to determine what is essential.
• The organization (or author) defines the workflows and components, then prioritizes the primary workflows and components to test. See WCAG-EM Steps 2 and 3 to help determine what workflows and components are representative samples.
• The ability to get to the workflow, (like login) also must be accessible.
• There are going to be technical violations of success criteria that don’t impact accessibility (for example, missing alt text that are explained in the text or the same HTML id attribute that aren’t ever referenced) that shouldn’t negatively impact the score. NOTE: There will be further development and amplification of what shouldn’t negatively impact the score. The concept of pass or fail should no longer be binary, but accounts for a concept of sufficient
• People still need to have access to material that still isn’t in the primary flow. Accessibility can be tested even if it doesn’t have a flow. NOTE: There needs to be a way that important sections, like navigation and footer, don’t get overlooked because they aren’t part of the flow.

Minutes of Joint AGWG Silver "Deep Dive" meeting on Representive Sampling where the group agreed to return to this discussion in a later draft.