Link to The easier-to-use dynamic version of Silver (not yet working). W3C requires strictly formatted documents for its purposes. Many people who are new to accessibility find that format is more difficult to use and that it lacks features like filtering and search. This document is intended for people writing standards. We recommend the usable version for most people. [This paragraph will be added when we develop that version.]
The Silver Accessibility Guidelines are the next major version update that will replace the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.x. "Silver Accessibility Guidelines" is a temporary project name. The formal name is still under discussion. This document illustrates structural changes and examples of content updates and changes using the Silver structure.
This is an Editor's Draft for the Silver Accessibility Guidelines project, published by the Silver Community Group. The content is only as an example of the structure and is NOT content that is approved by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG).
Introduction
People with disabilities can face problems using online content and applications. Disabilities can be permanent, temporary, or recurring limitations
We need guidelines to:
- identify these barriers encountered by people with disabilities.
- explain how to solve the problems they pose.
The research done in 2017-2018 by the Silver Task Force, the Silver Community Group, and their academic and corporate research partners was used to identify the key problem statements related to the current accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.x, ATAG 2.0 and UAAG 2.0). See the Silver Research Summary slides for more detailed information. These problem statements were used to identify the opportunities for Silver to address that will improve accessibility guidance.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was designed to be technology neutral, and has stayed relevant for over 10 years. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 has been implemented in open source authoring tool communities (chiefly Wordpress and Drupal) with little known uptake in commercial authoring tools. UAAG 2.0 offers useful guidance to user agent developers and has been implemented on an individual success criterion basis. There is no known user agent that has implemented all of UAAG 2.0. These guidelines have normative guidance for content, and helpful implementation advice for authoring tools, user agents and assistive technologies.
During the year of Silver research, a recurring theme was the popularity and quality of the guidance in WCAG 2.0. Most of the opportunities identified in the research were improvements in the structure and presentation accessibility guidance to improve usability, to support more disability needs, and to improve maintenance.
Guidelines
These are early drafts of guidelines based on experiments done with different groups. They are used to illustrate what Silver could look like and to test the process of writing content. These guideline drafts should not be considered as final content of Silver. These guidelines are just samples of potential content. They are there to show how the structure would work. They are not content agreed on by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. The numbering is incidental to the W3C tool being used to create the guidelines. As this draft matures, numbering of individual guidelines will be removed to improve overall usability of the guidelines in response to public requests.
The guidelines below were selected to illustrate specific aspects of the Silver structure.
- Alternative Text is a migration from WCAG 2.1 to Silver with minimal updates.
- Visual Contrast is a migration from WCAG 2.1 with significant updates:
- New calculations of contrast based on more modern research on color perception.
- Merging the AA and AAA levels into one guideline.
- New tests
- Clear Language is a new guideline proposed by the Cognitive Accessibility Task Force (COGA), and includes research, documents and comments from COGA. It showcases a new rubric test that could not be included in WCAG.
- Section Headings is the first guideline that Silver worked on as part of the prototyping process. It does not represent the latest in Silver development and will be updated in a future Working Draft.
Headings
Use headings and sub-headings for your text. Headings — including titles and subtitles — organize words and images on a web page.
Explanation of Headings
Clear Language:
Use clear language that readers easily understand.
Explanation of Clear Language
How well are we supporting the differences in disabilities (such as aphasia, dyslexia, and more)?
Visual Contrast
Provide sufficient contrast between foreground text and its background.
Explanation of Visual Contrast
We propose changing the name of “Color Contrast” to “Visual Contrast” as a signal of a paradigm change from one about color to one about “perception of light intensity”. The reason for this change is that the understanding of contrast has matured and the available research and body of knowledge has made breakthroughs in advancing the understanding of “visual contrast”.
The proposed new guidance more accurately models current research in human visual perception of contrast and light intensity. The goal is to improve understanding of the functional needs of all users, and more effectively match the needs of those who face barriers accessing content. This new perception-based model is more context dependent than a strict light ratio measurement; results can, for example, vary with size of text and the darkness of the colors or page.
This model is more responsive to user needs and allows designers more choice in visual presentation. It does this by including multi-factor assessment tests which integrate contrast with interrelated elements of visual readability, such as font features. It includes tests to determine an upper limit of contrast, where elevated contrast may impact usability.
Scoring & Conformance
This section is under development. Comments are welcome.
When the Silver Task Force did research with stakeholders of WCAG 2.0, they found that generally, people like the guidance of WCAG, but wanted changes to the structure. The major issues that are addressed are:
- Changing the "all or nothing" approach of WCAG success criteria conformance to a percentage based scoring system.
- Formalizing a representative sampling approach to conformance to address the needs of large, complex, or dynamic sites, apps, projects, or products.
- Allowing the organization (this includes company, business, non-profit, government) to prioritize what it important for their product for accessibility assessment.
Conformance is a complex topic with many parts that work together. Scoring is more easily understood. Scoring is "how well did I do?" We are attempting to better support common practice by providing mechanisms that better match the way the conformance claims are generally used on entire websites. We have several suggestions of how a company or organization can meaningfully claim conformance to an entire site, especially a large site.
- We want to have the conformance better reflect the experience of people with disabilities using the site or product that we are measuring. It allows an organization to say that "we may not be 100% conformant, but our site or product is very usable by people with disabilities" and they can express that in a meaningful way.
- We want to ensure that conformance doesn't dis-proportionally favor one disability over another.
- Many sites will have workflows that are less critical than other portions of the site, and that should be determined by the site owner.
Goals
The goals are based on the Silver research, the results from the Silver Design Sprint, and input from the Silver Community Group and Task Force.
- Make conformance better aligned with the experience of people with disabilities, keeping in mind that people with different disabilities have different experiences.
- Don't elevate the needs of one disability over another disability.
- Support a measurement and conformance structure that includes guidance for a broad range of disabilities. This includes particular 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.
- Be inclusive of more organizations needs
- Be user oriented instead of page oriented. What is the person trying to do?
- Wherever possible, preserve the organization’s investment in training, tooling and knowledge.
- Support the ability for organizations to define the a logical subset of a site for conformance.
- Develop 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.
- Remove “accessibility supported” as an author responsibility and provide guidance to authoring tools, browsers and assistive technology developers of the expected behaviors of their products.
- Improve tests so that repeated tests get more consistent results.
- Increase potential for automation of tests.
How Conformance fits into the Information Architecture
We aren’t losing content, we are restructuring
- Flattening the overall structure of WCAG 2.x
- From: Principle, Guidelines, Success Criteria and Techniques
- To: Guidelines and Methods
- Guidelines are general information and intent written in plain language
- Methods are specific examples, instructions, and tests with more technical information
- We are adding a tagging engine to make it easier for people to find information.
- We want organizations to be able to extract the guideline data to use for their own purposes.
- Guidelines will include:
- updated WCAG 2.1 guidance (technology-specific success criteria will become Methods)
- new guidance written for Silver
- new guidance for task completion testing
- Methods are associated with Guidelines. In general, Methods are technology specific.
- Methods include tests for the Method.
- Each Guideline will have multiple Methods with existing WCAG Technique guidance or new Methods written for Silver.
- Methods can provide guidance for:
- User agents
- Authoring tools
- Assistive technology
- Emerging technologies
Scope of conformance claim
Conformance is determined by site or project, not by individual page. The individual organization determines the scope of the claim. Large organizations will probably have more narrow scopes than the entire site or product that they will want to claim (e.g. a newspaper might have a different claim for the crosswords section than for the news articles).
Points & Levels
Each guideline awards points.
All points count towards an overall total, and the minimum for each category must be met. The categories are based on the Mandate 376 Functional User Needs, but will need some additional categories such as needs of people with vestibular disorders and more granular breakdown of cognitive disability categories.
- This is an additive scoring system. It increases the score for accessibility achievement instead of penalizing for fails.
- Scoring will be by percentage: each guideline will be worth 1 point (100%) -- a complete failure would be worth 0 points 0%. You cannot have a score higher than 1 or lower than 0. Note that this is a change from scoring by Method to scoring by Guideline overall. Multiple methods for one guideline don’t gain more points. (This had been a flaw that was bothering me that could allow the system to be gamed by using multiple methods. )
- A minimum percentage must be achieved in each disability category, based on the modified Mandate 376 Functional User Needs. The modifications include disabilities that are not included in Mandate 376 like Vestibular Disorders and breaks down the cognitive disability into groups of cognitive disabilities with common needs. Note: Exactly what that minimum percentage is needs to be established by further research. It can be plugged in later. We want the majority of sites that meet WCAG AA today to pass this minimum in Silver. (W3C Authentication spec uses this normalization.)
- There is no weighting for importance, severity, difficulty (both of difficulty for humans to use and difficulty for coders to implement), or other reason.
- For automated tests, the total instances of the condition are divided by the total passes for that condition. That gives a percentage response.
- For advanced Silver tests, there will be a mathematical condition that will be a part of the test. For example, a rubric test would have the total points scored divided by the number of factors. (We need examples of other tests.)
- Once the minimum level is achieved in each category, all of the guidelines that are met to whatever percentage they are met increase the score.
- The total score is divided by the number of guidelines that apply to give a final percentage. (If a guideline isn’t used, then you don’t divide by that one).
- If you are using sampling (see the following section), then the score is by the pages or screens tested.
The overall points total contribute to the level of conformance achieved.
Bronze is the lowest level of conformance, Silver is the middle level of conformance, and Gold is the highest level of conformance that can be met. Higher point totals will be needed to reach higher levels of conformance. We will need more research to determine where the breakpoints will be.
Note: We have chosen these level names since they have international understanding and are easily translated.
Sampling
Sampling helps give confidence whether people building the product, app, site, or digital property have done the accessibility work that makes the product more accessible to people with disabilities. Sampling gives an indication of where you are in accessibility, but it doesn't guarentee that you have found every problem. It is particularly effective when a product or site is built with accessible components.
Representative sampling is a way to assess large properties without having to test every screen. Representative sampling is common in accessibility testing, partcularly for manual testing. Sampling is optional. Anyone who wants to test all their pages or screens can do so.
There are a number of approaches to sampling (several laid out in Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0). The more a site is generated from a set of components, the more you want to get those components accessible.
There are two basic approaches - to evaluate components (which include templates) for accessibility or to evaluate workflows for accessibility. A combination of both approaches is most effective.
Different size breakpoints for sampling
- Sites under 10 pages or products under 10 screens need to test every page or screen
- Sites from 11 - 100 pages or products with 11 - 100 screens (including counting the different dynamic states)
- All pages need to be tested with available automated tests. (We need to find a way of saying “use a good test tool”).
- 10% of the pages need in-depth testing including manual testing.
- These should be representative samples of the pages. See WCAG-EM Parts 2-3 for guidance in selecting a representative sample.
- Common elements such as headers, footers and navigation must also have manual testing.
- There may be some guidelines, like clear language, that need a higher percentage of sample pages for testing. We are waiting for research results.
- Sites or products from 100 - 1000 pages or screens may
- Automated test of all pages or screens
- In-depth test of 10% of the pages or screens up to 40 samples, 40% of the samples tested are selected and 60% are randomly selected. See WCAG-EM Parts 2-3 for guidance in selecting a representative sample and random selections.
- Pick out primary workflows plus high traffic pages and make sure that the workflows are accessible.
- Sites or products over 1000 pages or screens
- Run automated tests on discrete sub-sections on a rotating basis.
- Pick out primary workflows plus high traffic pages and make sure that the workflows are accessible.
- Test representative material, test common components (like header, footer, login, or navigation), test any unique components, test common templates with representative data.
- Sites or products over 1000 pages or screens
- Run automated tests on discrete sub-sections on a rotating basis.
- Pick out primary workflows plus high traffic pages and make sure that the workflows are accessible.
- Test representative material, test common components (like header, footer, login, or navigation), test any unique components, test common templates with representative data.
- Organizations doing continuous development could test conformance by components or task flows.
- Note: Should we also have breakpoints for complex or dynamic products?
Notes from discussion
- 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 (company, non-profit) 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.
Accessibility Supported
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Authors are not responsible for the browser or assistive technology. While this may not seem supportive, in the long run it will improve overall experience for people with disabilities by standardizing their experience and encouraging user agents and assistive technologies to conform to standards. This advice will be non-normative suggestions. Needs more work in phrasing.
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Browsers, user agents, and assistive technology receive guidance how their product could help authors meet Silver. This is included in the Information Architecture prototype.