Scope of guidelines

[sdw32]

From the abstract:

"The W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 provide a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible to users with disabilities."

Can the scope of the guidelines be extended beyond making web content more accessible to users with disabilities. Colourblindness and age-related long sightedness are not severe enough to meet the definition of disability, yet I would certainly hope the WCAG guidelines should help make content more accessible for people with these issues.

[jpascalides]

Thank you for your comment. Project members are working on your comment. You may see discussion in the comment thread and we may ask for additional information as we work on it. We will mark the official response when we are finished and close the issue.

[mraccess77]

The Low Vision Accessibility Task Force will be looking into creating supplemental guidance where additional issues that fall outside of WCAG may be covered.

[bruce-usab]

@sdw32 — I am not confident that this has been mentioned recently, but the luminosity color contrast metrics and requirements in WCAG 2.x do a good job addressing the needs of people with color blindness and age-related vision issues. That was very much one of the considerations for settling on the 9:2 ratio in SC. By providing that much contrast, the hues that are problematic for people who are color blind are addressed by ensuring good contrast in the luminosity.

The Understanding docs do not talk about the feature. But maybe they should?

[rachaelbradley]

Draft Response: The Requirements for WCAG 3.0 include the design principle to "Support the needs of a wide range of people with disabilities and recognize that people have individual and multiple needs." This is being done by capturing functional needs at DRAFT Functional Needs. This includes color blindness and limited central vision as well as other visual limitations. If you note functional needs that are not included on that document, please respond here and we will reopen this issue or file a new issue. Thank you for your review and feedback.

[sdw32]

Thanks for the reply, my top-level issue remains that right from the start, the scope of WCAG is implied to be limited to people with disabilities. The second statement 'recognise that people have individual and multiple needs' still does nothing to broaden the scope to the entire population. I would much prefer a statement of a design principle like "Support the needs of the wide range of people in the population, which includes those with disabilities".

[chaals]

@sdw32, speaking as an individual, who is not (normally) a participant in the group:

I believe that what you are asking for is already considered fundamental to the group's work.

The W3C members have agreed to charter this group to work on the scope as described.

However, as understood by the W3C members, and the group, the term "disability does cover situations such as "I need to wear glasses to read", or "I am red-green colourblind" (the ones you mentioned), among others.

This can clearly be deduced from the fact that 3 W3C WCAG Recommendations over 20-some years have explicitly covered those issues, and that they continue to be discussed in ongoing work.

[mraccess77]

@chaals and all - I am not aware of any international regulations that claim people are disabled if the have to wear glasses to access content. All regulations I am familiar indicate disability is defined including eye glasses.

Indicating that people who need glasses to see 20/20 are disabled minimizes the everyday challenges people with disabilities faces I can't simply put on a pair of eye glasses to see. Statements like the above are in fact similar to saying things like "all lives matter". Yes, they do - but it minimalizes what those of us in marginalized populations experience. I've seen similar arguments that when someone is holding a coffee and only has 1 hand free that they a disability.

I'm sorry folks - if you are holding a coffee and one hand but have full use of both hands otherwise you DO NOT have a disability with your arms when you hold a coffee. That is in fact derogatory to people with disabilities.

If WCAG is not specific to disability then it's really just a usability guideline. If everyone has a disability then again it's only really about usability then. People with disability face unique challenges - but the solutions do often benefit people without disabilities as well. So what is done to support people with disabilities can be very innovative for all. There are in fact many people with disabilities although particular disabilities may occur in specific situations such as anxiety and PTSD. Situational disabilities are real disabilities that are situational trigger - not I forgot my glasses. Obviously if you forget your glasses you can benefit from the guidelines and guidance.

[rachaelbradley]

Final response: The Requirements for WCAG 3.0 include the design principle to "Support the needs of a wide range of people with disabilities and recognize that people have individual and multiple needs." This is being done by capturing functional needs at DRAFT Functional Needs. This includes color blindness and limited central vision as well as other visual limitations. If you note functional needs that are not included on that document, please respond here and we will reopen this issue or file a new issue. Thank you for your review and feedback.

[sdw32]

Hi, I have read through the various responses, I don't consider this issue to be closed. From my perspective, I agree that attempting to broaden the definition of disability to include temporary/situational difficulties is derogatory to those with actual disabilities. However, the current statement remains focused on disability, and continues to reinforce the unhelpful position that accessible websites are only useful for people with disabilities.

In order to resolve both of these, I would suggest rewording to something like

"Support the needs of a wide range of people with disabilities, while also recognising that all people may have needs for accessible content, depending on the circumstances."

I will look forward to further discussions on this topic.