consistent-navigation-ACT-Rule-proposal

[ChrisLoiselle]

Consistent Navigation manual test rule proposal

<< Describe the changes >>

Adding manual test for consistent navigation within ACT rule structure and formatting.

[Jym77]

I've updated the frontmatter with id, mappings, …

[ChrisLoiselle]

@Jym77 on the topic of test subject, I defer to how we write rules and your knowledge of ACT vs. how we read WCAG's SC for understanding. I'm not clear as to changing the rule to interpret the SC other than how it is written. If you feel that we need to remove the ambiguous phrasing to make the rule more concrete and testable, then I support your recommendation. I don't want to change the SC based on the rule is where I'm coming from on the perspective of pulling from the SC on the testable content.

[ChrisLoiselle]

@Jym77 I'll give all of this some more thought and we can revisit soon. I should have more bandwidth next week. Thanks for all your feedback and the threaded discussion points!

[Jym77]

@Jym77 on the topic of test subject, I defer to how we write rules and your knowledge of ACT vs. how we read WCAG's SC for understanding. I'm not clear as to changing the rule to interpret the SC other than how it is written. If you feel that we need to remove the ambiguous phrasing to make the rule more concrete and testable, then I support your recommendation. I don't want to change the SC based on the rule is where I'm coming from on the perspective of pulling from the SC on the testable content.

Yes, we cannot change the SC, but we can precise some of its terms. Being unbambiguous is a requirement of our own rules format:

Applicability must be described objectively, unambiguously and in plain language.

I remember when we wrote the rule for Bypass block that we discussed about what makes a set of pages we should look for repeated content. In the end, we used the pages at "distance 1 " (1 link away) from the page under test (definition of block of repeated content).

This could also be a possibility here. That is, a page passes the rule if its "navigational mechanisms" are in the "same relative order" as they are in pages at distance 1. That would keep the focus (and the test subject) on a single page.

I was suggesting to have a (given) set of pages as a test subject. While I'm fairly convinced that could work on the conceptual level, this is something we haven't done, and rules don't really have way to say what is their test subject. So that might actually not really work in practice…

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Also, remember that rules tend to only test part of a SC (because testing all of it in an unambiguous rule can be very tricky). So, it is perfectly fine to write a rule with the following properties:

• when the rule fails, it is 100% guaranteed that the SC is not satisfied.
• when the rule pass, there is still a possibility for the SC to be not satisfied.

this often gives us way to work around ambiguities by putting them in the untested bits. For example, if we list "navigational mechanism" as being breadcrumb and site navigation, then we are sure that swapping these breaks 3.2.3. We haven't solved the question of search form (or other), and we're not taking position on whether swapping the search field with the breadcrumb is OK or not. But we still have a valuable rule that detects some problems.

Similarly, if we end up with a definition of "set of web pages" which is too restrictive, this is also OK. As long as we can guarantee that a problem within our "set of web pages" is a WCAG failure, we're good; even if our "set of web pages" is too restrictive and it being OK doesn't guarantee that 3.2.3 is satisfied. Of course, we want our definition to be as close as possible as WCAG's intention, in order to have as much value as possible. But our main concern is first and foremost to have unambiguous rules.