A Little bit Accessibility is better than nothing
It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of full conformance. The concept of full conformance is difficult to understand, difficult to explain and difficult to implement. Full conformance means that a certain accessibility standard has been fully met. In the EU, this is EN 301549, as far as it applies to the product or service or its provider.
It is true that accessibility is relatively easy to implement if you pay attention to it from the start. But at least with more complex projects and an inexperienced team, this cannot be done without a well-integrated accessibility professional. And of course, this does not come for free. But as a rule, you are not dealing with completely new projects, but with existing systems.
Super complex rules do not help anyone
Hard rules make sense where there is little room for flexibility. If I make a wheelchair access too narrow, it will be very expensive or even impossible to convert it later. This also applies to hardware. Designing an eBook reader is complex and it is difficult to make it accessible afterwards.
The situation is different with software, including software that runs on hardware such as reading devices or ATMs. Here, designs, programming techniques and accessibility requirements can Change and will change. In this respect, very strict rules often do not make sense.
Dogmatic by nature
In every scene, you can clearly distinguish between two groups: the dogmatic and the pragmatic. Think of any scene that you know well and you will immediately think of people who you can assign to one group or the other. As a rule, the ratio is balanced. In accessibility, things are different: the dogmatic ones make up the majority of the scene.
Full conformance forces dogmatism: many experts appear to be dyed-in-the-wool radicals. Sometimes I see them in front of me: people who throw WCAG rules at each other like Bible verses and fight each other to the death. Apparently, this harsh interpretation and the lack of willingness to compromise is the reason why the further development of the WCAG standards is taking so long. In Germany, you can see this in the DIN Spec Easy Language, which is apparently taking so long because of internal conflicts. The WCAG nerds' favorite saying is "A little bit of accessibility is not possible." Some print this saying on their T-shirts.
Perhaps this is in the nature of things. Most of these people have no disability and therefore no practical experience. Vegans eat vegan food, but accessibility professionals do not need accessibility because they do not have a disability. I have actually found that some disabled experts are more relaxed than non-disabled people. But younger experts are also often more relaxed when interpreting the rules than veterans. Exceptions prove the rule.
Dogmatism could perhaps be justified if the WCAG did not leave many gaps and room for interpretation. Full conformance depends not only on the rules, but on their interpretation and the personal opinion of the experts. That is why certifications are nonsense, because in the end they are always based on such factors and are a snapshot. In my view, this is a waste of resources. The micro-optimizations often serve the sole purpose of achieving full conformance; whether the measures make sense in individual cases cannot be asked because conformance is legally defined. One example is 4.1.1. Parsing. It was retroactively abolished in WCAG 2.1, but still has to be fulfilled because it is included in the EN. This means that even though we know it is superfluous, we have to check it.
The WAI itself says that the WCAG is not exhaustive. BITV 2.0 requires that the state of the art be observed. Procedures such as the BITV test and full conformance ignore this completely.
Full conformance does not guarantee good usability for disabled people. Unfortunately, this does not go down well with the accessibility veterans either.
Some people can't afford it
It's better to have nothing than 100 percent accessibility. Nobody says that, but don't many people in our circles think and act like that? And don't the old hands in particular think that they're the only ones who do everything right?
But what about the local women's shelter that couldn't afford an accessibility test? What about the small museum that was fooled by a web developer who claimed he knew accessibility? What about the association that was presented with a fake PAC test. These are all things that I've experienced more than once in my career.
For these institutions, 100 percent is too expensive, and so is 50 percent. But 10 percent accessibility would make any dogmatist hang up the phone. According to our logic, they don't even need to start if they don't aim for 100 percent AA. If they can't afford it, they're out of luck.
Not anything goes, but something goes
Of course there is a risk that providers will implement something without strict rules and then sell it as accessible. But I believe that the chance that someone will start with a little accessibility and then expand it is not that small. It is sometimes even easier: those responsible can gradually smuggle accessibility into the projects: first into design, then into development and finally into the editorial department, first into the design library, then into the development library and finally into the editorial manual. Those involved have much more time to implement it and in the end they may be better than those who strictly follow the WCAG. Because these people want to implement the rules 1:1 and not do anything more than what they are obliged to do.
Fewer strict rules, more recommendations
The WCAG and EN 301549 threaten to become an unworkable set of rules. 100, 120 or 150 rules - anything seems possible. At some point, even for experts, this will become so complex that it will hardly be possible to implement. Just like data protection - good idea, bad implementation - it slows down progress and digital accessibility because the completion of applications is delayed indefinitely. The implementation of PDF UA - as far as I know, not legally anchored anywhere - is almost impossible, like making gold out of dung.
In my opinion, a few must-have rules are enough. This includes, for example, usability via keyboard, i.e. essentially what is in WCAG 2.x A. I would actually implement the rest as first level (AA) and second level (AAA) recommendations. Recommendation means it is desirable that it is implemented, but it is not mandatory to achieve conformance.
Communication to the outside world
Unlike the concept of conformance, the term accessibility is not firmly defined. In external communication, it is therefore useful to communicate either a level of the WCAG as the goal of your own efforts or the concrete measures that you have taken. If you say, for example, "We have made sure that our website can be operated entirely by keyboard," this is a simple, verifiable statement that does not suggest that you have met a full level of conformance.
You can also say that you have used LibreOffice or MS Office to make your PDFs accessible. In most cases, this would be completely sufficient. Disabled people have more understanding here if you explain the problem to them than the WCAG and PDF UA nerds.