Silver Requirements

Abstract

This document outlines the requirements that the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has set for development of Accessibility Guidelines moving forward. These requirements are based on feedback from the use of previous accessibility guidelines and research performed to gather more information about accessibility guidelines in user needs, in terms of practical use, and in maintenance.

Introduction

People with disabilities encounter barriers to accessing and making use of content and functionality made available online. We need guidelines for how to identify these barriers for addressing so that people with disabilities can use the content and functionality.

People need guidelines for how to create and assess content and functionality that they make available online.

Design Principles

It is the view of Silver that accessibility guidelines should include the principles and intent of previous guidelines, and:

1. Support a broad range of needs of people with disabilities.
2. Include people with disabilities in the process.
3. Include global considerations, participation and feedback.
4. Be measurable.
5. Be flexible to emerging needs of people with disabilities and technologies.
6. Be about and for people – technology is important but secondary.
7. Strive to be data informed and evidence based.
8. Be usable and accessible.

Requirements

Previous accessibility guidelines described how to make a set of web pages loaded with a traditional web browser accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines provided this via strictly pass/fail tests with the goal of consistently reproducible conformance results.

Silver will build on these previous guidelines to:

1. Silver will provide more information than a simple pass/fail statement. For example, it may describe "minimal" and "better" methods of conforming to a requirement.
2. Create a structure for guidelines that can better meet the needs of people with disabilities in future technologies and interactions.
3. Write the guidelines using Plain Language.
4. Make the guidelines available in different accessible and usable ways.
5. Use a process to work on Silver that can include people with disabilities.

Background: Problem Statements Around Current Guidelines

The Problem Statements describe areas that came up in research for Silver in 2017-2018 that we need to focus on and address in the new guidelines, to provide some background for how we developed these requirements.

Usability

• Too Difficult to Read
• Difficult to get started
• Ambiguity in interpreting the success criteria
• Persuading Others

Conformance Model

• Constraints on What is Strictly Testable
• Human Testable
• Accessibility Supported
• Evolving Technology

Maintenance

• Flexibility
• Scaling
• Governance