A recent commit of mine has lead to test failures in xwiki-platform-distribution-flavor-test-webstandards, from CustomDutchWebGuidelinesValidator. Most of the reported validation errors made sense, and I fixed them, except for one where I think the rule is too strict. So I tried to find more information about this rule to see if maybe our implementation is too strict (because we’re not using a third party validator for this, we use our own implementation of the rules). But:
I couldn’t find the “Dutch Web Guidelines” rules anywhere on the web
The JavaDoc of HTML5DutchWebGuidelinesValidator.java quotes a text that mentions “125 quality requirements” and each requirement seems to have an ID, like rpd9s1.tag, but there’s no link to get more information about these requirements, and again I can’t find anything relevant on the web (at least in English)
On WCAGTesting page there’s a “Now deprecated” warning box under “Dutch Web Guidelines” and above I see:
XWiki <15.2 XWiki was using the Dutch Web Guidelines to validate accessibility
which is misleading because the test I’m trying to fix failed on 17.3.0-SNAPSHOT, and it’s about Dutch Web Guidelines. So we’re still validating against Dutch Web Guidelines.
So does anyone know what’s the status of Dutch Web Guidelines Validation? Are these tests covering something that WCAG 2.2 is not covering? What value do they bring? And if there is a value, do you know where these rules are documented?
AFAIK, they don’t cover as much as our current WCAG tests. The checks are not exactly the same as WCAG, it was a standard that existed next to it a long time ago but AFAIK it’s irrelevant today. IMO they don’t bring much value today (if any at all…), we should spend some time to remove the tests.
Note that the exact rules were worded a bit differently to WCAG, so on a few points it was more restrictive, but IMO it’s not really better than WCAG for user experience.
WCAG was existing back then but the Dutch Guidelines were more strict (and added more rules). IMO we should keep them as they’re good and already coded and validating our templates. We can call them what we want (XWiki Accessibility Guidelines if we don’t like the Dutch Guidelines name). We could also review the tests and for those that don’t exist in WCAG, decide what to do (but I’m not sure why we’d remove them as they were good and still are IMO - it’s fine to review and adjust if we need to). But we must not remove them or we’ll loose a lot of validations (I’m pretty sure that our current WCAG tests don’t cover as much through our UI tests compared to these).
Okay. Since we agree we want to keep them, then we should have some proper documentation (as mentionned by Marius, the current doc is outdated and lacking). I’m adding myself a reminder to spend some time on it on the next Doc Fixing Day (26th of June) if noone improves things here before then .
.