Academical vs. practical thinking when writing specs and notes

first published: September 14, 2025 and collected in: accessibility

One of my voluntary roles is participating in the Accessibility Internationalization Community Group. Our focus is on improving the internationalization of publications from the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force and the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG).

With this we currently focus on WCAG 3 and the next version of Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities.

If you have ever read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), you will know just how difficult the text is to read. The Understanding docs do not help much either, as they are super dense. They are certainly one of those docs, where I like to use a screen reader while reading.

For the longest time I have been wondering why these texts are written the way they are. Now, that actually get to help shaping the next versions of 2 documents, I have understood some of it.

The texts we get to work on, appear to be often written from a more academical perspective. In other words, they appear to be written in an fashion that reflects the academical ideal of accessibility. This creates specs and notes that are pure and sadly useless, just like XHTML 2 (which I believe was great, but entirely misguided) was.

An Academical perspective is wonderful, but texts that exist to guide the actions of people working on accessibility, need to be rooted in reality and should be practical to follow. They should be easy to understand and easy to localise.

This is a tough process, as it is easy to hide behind convoluted wording and grand thinking (I am still learning to control myself). But it is worth to help the editors of specs and notes by joining groups like ours as well as commenting on the ongoing process of writing specs and notes.

Do not be intimidated, if your English is not perfect. I am a native german speaker, with dyslexia and (likely) ADHD. The struggle is real. Though if you practice accessibility in any way and have some capacity to make things better for all of us, write, comment, join a croup as much as you can.

We need you!