In response to concerns raised with the Focus Appearance and Target Size success criteria in the most recent Candidate Recommendation (CR), the working group has decided to publish another CR. This allows review and implementation of the substantive changes proposed to address these concerns, along with fallback options (known as “at risk”) if the solutions raise new concerns.
The group felt that keeping these success criteria is important and that the changes were valuable enough to delay the final Recommendation. Restarting CR starts a new 90-day patent review clock, so we are looking at finalizing the Recommendation in Q3 of this year.
The following changes have been made since the last CR:
- Focus Appearance has been simplified, made slightly more rigorous to reflect new research, and moved to AAA. Several notes were also adjusted to support these changes.
- Focus Visible will not be moved to A and will remain at AA
- Two exceptions in Target size have been modified:
- The phrase “ or is in a bulleted or numbered list” has been removed from the Inline exception. This has no effect on the intent to provide an exception for text links in body. The phrase was too narrow and was causing confusion. Additional explanation about inline lists will be included within the understanding documents.
- The spacing exception was reworded to use a 24 CSS pixel diameter circle centered on the bounding box instead of a target offset.
You can read the revised editor’s draft.
As always, you can learn more from What’s New in WCAG 2.2