WCAG 3’s road to hell is paved with supplemental requirements

First, I want to apologize to the participants of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) at W3C, as this blog post will criticize their work. I know everyone in W3C WGs is passionate and well-meaning. But from my work at W3C, I also recognize that there are group dynamics which reinforce the opinion inside the group and sometimes devalue outside input. It’s a group confirmation bias situation, if you will.My goal with this article is to hopefully help to change some fundamental assumptions that lead to a situation that I find unfortunate and that might hurt WCAG 3 in the long run.Earlier this week, a new draft of WCAG 3 was published, and it got the usual fanfare, including a very coarse change log and an announcement by the group chairs. You should read both.The latter article points at the Motivation section in the WCAG 3 Requirements document: The Guidelines motivate organizations to go beyond minimal accessibility requirements with a conformance model that shows which…