Changelog for Understanding and Techniques pages

[TestPartners]

For some purposes, it is not sufficient to just know what the Understanding and Techniques pages currently say. Sometimes, it is necessary to know what they said and when, such as when reviewing whether accessibility testing was done correctly or whether third-party developers should fix non-conformances at their own cost.

There is currently no simple way for anyone to view all the changes made to Understanding and Techniques pages (and others) over time. That information exists in GitHub, but it is fragmented and difficult to discover, assuming you even know the GitHub repository exists. It's actually easier, but not easy, to use the Internet Archive to track changes over time, but we should not need to rely on a third party for this.

Is it possible to implement a changelog for each page, that is linked from that page? Unfortunately, the list of commits, such as https://github.com/w3c/wcag/commits/main/understanding/20/keyboard.html, contains a large number of changes that don't relate to the page content, so it is not very useful.

[guyhickling]

There is another reason why we need to know when and what changes are made to the WCAG Understanding and Technique documents, and many others. It becomes extremely embarrassing if consultants tell a client that an Understanding document for one of the SCs says [such and such], and they reply back to say “no it doesn’t”, and we take a look and they’re right, it doesn’t any more even though it did at some, no longer documented, time in the past!

We all of us need to be a) notified when changes are made (at the time of the change), and b) we need to see the back history for any particular document. As Steve says, it needs a changelog or other list of documented changes (showing before and after). Especially so to the most important documents like the WCAG Understanding docs.

If the changes to a document are too many to list, then can the Group please keep the earlier version with underlines and/or colour or similar markings to show the bits that were changed. The documents would also benefit form each one having its own version number that we can reference it by.

The WCAG is not some minor standard used optionally by a few organisations who choose. It is of global importance, and is even incorporated into the law code of many countries. That is another reason for providing a professional historical record of changes.

[mraccess77]

The guidance for SC 3.3.2 has suddenly changed fairly significantly and this causes people to question what is actually required. Without some explanation of the change and previous interpretations it create challenges for the work we do. Folks are spotting the 3.3.2 change in the WCAG 2.2 branch but not others and trying to locate something they previously read and it's confusing when it's suddenly gone in one branch.