@eric@juliemoynat@craigabbott that seems to come from standard VPAT conventions that tie this partial/with exceptions language to an evaluation of support across a whole product. of course pass/fail is binary, but in an ACR you then give a statement of how much of the site/app is broken ... #a11y#accessibility [edit: edited for tone, which was unnecessarily confrontational]
@eric@juliemoynat@craigabbott unless the rant is more nuanced that either, outside of an ACR, vendors try to use that language as a result of a specific WCAG SC in isolation, and/or even in an ACR context, where none of their pages/samples across the entire product pass, but they still try to pass it off as a partial/with exceptions
@patrick_h_lauke@eric@juliemoynat@craigabbott for clarification, it was in the context of procurement into public sector departments in the UK, where WCAG AA compliance is the law. VPATs don’t really count here. It’s compliant or bust.
@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat sounds to me like they're submitting a standard ACR, but that for your procurement process only an ACR that notes things are outright just "Supports" won't be considered. so perhaps less a "they're trying to hoodwink us", more "they're just using the standard ITI VPAT and don't understand our specific procurement requirements"?
@patrick_h_lauke@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat you’re probably correct in most cases. And, in hindsight, the tone of this article isn’t great. But I can say I directly experienced several attempts at “hoodwinking”, where had there not been proper due diligence we’d have procured something that fell way below the legal standards. The language they’d use was slippery at best, deceptive at worst.
@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat sorry, didn't mean to tone-police or anything, but was struck by the very specific language of "partially supports" / "supports with exceptions" you were railing against that those of us tasked with churning out ACRs (for often horribly borked things) are all too familiar with. and oh absolutely, vendors can be slippery (flashing to lengthy conversations with some who receive an ACR and then argue back "why did you mark this as Does Not Support?" etc)
@juliemoynat@craigabbott@eric sorry, Accessibility Conformance Report (i.e. the result of entering your product's conformance in a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT))
@juliemoynat@craigabbott@eric ... though most people call the end result a VPAT as well (my usual rant about "Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster")
@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat and there is always such a weird fine line when even putting together ACRs for very large complex systems...if there's a single small failure/bug with minimal to no actual user impact on a sub-page somewhere, in theory you can't have "Supports" and must declare an exception. there's often a very arbitrary subjective cut-off point there between claiming "Supports" and the next level down...
@patrick_h_lauke@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat I think looking at the article again, the tone is definitely one that skirts the edge of arrogance when it was genuinely just anger and frustration at the time. Maybe I need to go back and tone it down or re-clarify some points! Appreciate your feedback.
@craigabbott@eric@juliemoynat i realise my original post here was probably also not using the best tone... let me go and edit it a bit, sounded too confrontational when it wasn't meant (I should stop just hot-taking after just waking up :) )
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