If I could walk that WAI I wouldn't need the guidelines

[j4]

Since the Understanding document ['Understanding WCAG 2.0'] is more than double the size of what it purports to explain, this itself may indicate a problem with WCAG 2.

Is it just me, or is an exposition of something often longer than what it's explaining? Particularly (one might even argue necessarily) when you're translating from technical specifications into more generally-accessible language, i.e. from high to low information density?

Comments

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

There are two ways forward.

1. Have two documents.
2. Have an executive summary, followed by a more thorough explanation.

One of the difficulties with some of the work I do is that the same manual goes to customers who can, at one end, be high-tech engineers who've been working with the relevant technology all their life. All they need to know is how our gadgets map to the previous generation of technology and they're away. At the other end, we can, quite literally, be giving the same product to a husband and wife company who work with it in their spare time. (I've heard tales of one piece of hardware being in a room with a tablecloth on it...)

This leads to a number of problems, which become more obvious when we have to add new bits and pieces to any given section of a document. Some people don't want, or care about, all the warnings we need to give to another group of customers, because it's bloody obvious to them. The best effort we can muster here is to have sub-sections that can be easily skipped over when the techies realise it's just explaining the differences between two perfectly obvious components.