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Tuesday Jun 13, 2006
Inaccessible accessibility
As a non-technical person involved in website development I have just about got to grips with the original standards for web accessibility established by W3C. They're not exactly in plain English but the main points seem reasonably clear.
Unfortunately these guidelines have been out-of-date for several years. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are still in draft form but, according to Joe Clark, they are not going to provide the clarity that the industry needs.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 were published in 1999 and quickly grew out of date. The proposed new WCAG 2.0 is the result of five long years’ work by a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) committee that never quite got its act together. In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas. WCAG 2 is not enough of an improvement and was not worth the wait.
Clark goes on to attack the process by which the Guidelines have been drawn up and offers little hope for any improvements before they are finally published.
Accessibility should be a significant issue for all web developers, but for charities meeting set standards is often closely linked to their mission and a prerequisite of funding. It was hard enough getting definitive interpretations on the original Guidelines but now, more than ever, it seems that organisations will have to trust the judgement of their chosen experts.
By the way, if you're planning to try to get to grips with the new Guidelines you'd better clear the diary. Clark reckons the three main documents (the Guidelines, an explanation of the Guidelines, and an explanation of "general techniques") run to 458 pages or 159, 800 words. Good luck.
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:52 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by YARI¿MA on September 18, 2007 at 03:29 PM GMT+00:00 #