What is the long-term plan for upgrading WCAG? The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) of the W3C is currently working on WCAG 2.1.
A small group of members of AGWG realized that we needed to start planning future versions of WCAG now, or it would be a very long time before a major upgrade would be completed. We thought that if we started now, we could take the time to do user research and background research to make that next major upgrade of WCAG. This is a great step forward in improving the usability, scope, and content. The task force is small, because most of the AGWG are rightly focused on WCAG 2.1, but people outside the AGWG are volunteering their time to help with the project.
At the CSUN 2017 conference, Shawn Lauriat of Google and I presented on the work being done in the W3C WCAG task force working on this next major upgrade of WCAG – still to be named. Provisionally we are calling it Silver, because Accessibility Guidelines = AG = Ag, the chemical symbol for Silver.
The Silver Task Force has compiled a stakeholder map and names of 350 people who want to give input into the project. The stakeholder map has identified 31 occupational roles that use or benefit from WCAG, and has mapped those roles to actions of how WCAG is used.
The Silver task force is working with researchers from academia and industry to develop research questions and research projects to support the design of Silver. After the initial research is completed in 2017, we will develop and test personas, use cases, user stories leading to prototypes in 2018.
Slides of the Silver presentation entitled “What Comes After WCAG 2.1?” are online, and links to more information on aspects of the project are in the slide notes. Google slides has been used for the presentation format. For tips on how to navigate Slides see: