Accessibility conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.1

[daniel-montalvo]

こんにちは TAG-さん!

I'm requesting a TAG review of Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.1.

The purpose of the Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) effort is to establish and document rules for testing the conformance of web content to accessibility standards, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These test rules address automated, semi-automated, and manual testing. ACT makes accessibility testing more transparent, and thus reduces confusion caused by different interpretations of accessibility guidelines.

• Explainer¹ (minimally containing user needs and example code): https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/act/
• Specification URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/2024/WD-act-rules-format-1.1-20240618/
• Tests: NA
• User research: none
• Security and Privacy self-review²: none
• GitHub repo: https://www.github.com/w3c/wcag-act/
• Primary contacts (and their relationship to the specification):
  • [name] ([github username]), [organization/s] (repeat as necessary, we recommend including group chairs and editors in this list)
  • Daniel Montalvo, daniel-montalvo, W3C, Staff Contact
  • Wilco Fiers, wilcofiers, Deque, Task Force co-Facilitator
  • Katherine Eng, kengdoj, Access Board, Task Force co-Facilitator
• Organization(s)/project(s) driving the specification: Deque, SiteImprove, Access Board, IBMproject name]
• Key pieces of existing multi-stakeholder (e.g. developers, implementers, civil society) support, review or discussion of this specification
• Key pieces of multi-implementer support:
  • Chromium comments: [url]
  • Mozilla comments: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/NNN
  • WebKit comments: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/NNN
  • etc...
• External status/issue trackers for this specification (publicly visible, e.g. Chrome Status):

Further details:

• I have reviewed the TAG's Web Platform Design Principles
• Relevant time constraints or deadlines: Ideally you can provide comments in two months from now.
• The group where the work on this specification is currently being done: Accessibility Conformance Testing Task Force
• The group where standardization of this work is intended to be done (if current group is a community group or other incubation venue): Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
• Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification:
• This work is being funded by:

You should also know that...

[please tell us anything you think is relevant to this review]

[matatk]

Thank you for sending us this review. We see a few different ways that your work could be applied, and be tested. As this document is on the REC track, certain criteria need to be met in order for it to advance. The main one of this is having "at least two independent implementations" of the thing being specified.

There are a number of possible avenues here—we're wondering which you are intending for this document. Some possibilities:

• The status quo: this document is specifying a format for writing ACT rules—in which case, the ACT rules documents themselves would count as implementations. We encourage you to ensure that the specification is precise enough to allow tools to be written that could verify, or 'lint', ACT rules against this spec—these linting tools would then form a test suite that ACT Rules authors could use to verify the rules documents they're writing.

• We also encourage you to publish a REC track document that aggregates the ACT rules as written by the CG—in which case the requirement for them to mature on the REC track would be that accessibility testing tools embodying (or supporting) the rules would be required.

• If you have a goal that manual testing tools should be able to load ACT rules, for humans to use in test procedures (which we encourage) then implementations would be accessibility testing tools that support the loading of ACT rules.

• Some of the ACT rules could be checked entirely mechanically. It's possible that ways could be developed to achieve this that could be used (by a machine) directly, as part of projects such as Playwright, Cypress, and/or Web Platform Tests (which has a somewhat different focus). This would allow the rules (or rather the mechanical checks underpinning them) to be more widely adopted, so we encourage you to investigate this approach in future.