And anyone who continually harps on one minor deficiency of a draft document has an axe to grind.

The fact that, at least in part, testability was probably pushed through in the WCAG Working Group by those members (stakeholders?) involved in producing authoring/testing tools is deplorable, and certainly shows where some of the members’ priorities and (not so hidden) agendas lie.

Not true. I was a WG participant at the time, and no such thing happened. Testability was a guiding principle of WCAG 2 because WCAG 1 was (along with Section 508) decried by implementers for not being testable enough.

In the case Gian cites, she was voted down unanimously – twice. On the second occasion, 19 working group participants voted against removing testability. Of those, 2 were reps from evaluation tool vendors, and 4 were from large companies (2 from IBM, who share one vote, and one each from Microsoft and Oracle). In attendance were 5 current and former WCAG editors (including Michael Cooper, who at the time was representing Watchfire, which bought Bobby), and 5 reps from accessibility advocacy groups.

At the time, you couldn’t get 19 people in the WCAG WG to agree that the sun rises in the east. So when they can agree so consistently on this one point, what is the most logical assumption to draw: that, after rehashing this same issue over and over and over again, they had thoughtfully considered the implications of both sides and determined that a standard that you can’t test isn’t worth the angle brackets it’s written with; or that a vast conspiracy was unhatched by the makers of Bobby specifically to disenfranchise Gian?

What really gets me is that Gian is going to get people to comment because they think non-testability will help them to dilute the conformance requirements to next to nothing, when what she really wants is to increase those requirements dramatically.

The fact that, at least in part, testability was probably pushed through in the WCAG Working Group by those members (stakeholders?) involved in producing authoring/testing tools is deplorable, and certainly shows where some of the members’ priorities and (not so hidden) agendas lie.

Hold on. Testability wasn’t pushed through by anyone. It was a guiding principle of WCAG 2, since WCAG 1 was decried by implementers (along with Section 508) as not testable enough.

When Gian proposed removing testability as a requirement for success criteria in April of 2005, she was voted down unanimously, in two consecutive meetings. There were 19 participants at the 29 April meeting, including 5 current and former WCAG editors, 5 reps from accessibility advocacy groups, 2 from assistive technology vendors, 2 reps (sharing one vote) from IBM, and one each from Microsoft and Adobe.

I was there the entire time this unfolded. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, foisted upon the Web community by the evaluation tool vendors. It was rejected after much discussion (indeed, after many, many discussions) by all types of stakeholder groups, who thought it was a bad idea. When the WCAG WG can agree on something that readily, that should be a pretty good sign that nobody’s arm was getting twisted.