1 Just when we started to get our house in order...

Hi Joe,

Great article, if a little worrying for developers.

Over the last couple of years, it seems to me the web development industry has really grown up and found its feet in terms of working to a common set of goals. We finally had a much needed set of “standards” to keep us in check and a yardstick to determine the good pages from the bad. The WCAG 1.0, as imperfect as they were, seemed to support and co-exist with developing standards compliant code (xhtml, css).

It now seems as though this could be completely upturned by the release of WCAG 2.0. The last thing we need as an industry is to revert back into turmoil and kludge, but it seems as though this is what is being promoted.

I will be keeping a close eye on how WCAG 2.0 develops and will be sure to check out your pages on the subject.

Thanks for the wake up call!

posted at 08:50 am on May 23, 2006 by Jon Ratcliffe

2 Standards, Judgement and the Samurai Way

Thankyou, Joe, for your succinct view of a complex problem.

It seems crazy that we should be seeing guidelines released by the WAI as a problem, but I guess things should be called as they are seen.

WCAG2.0 seems like a massive leap backwards and sounds like it can do nothing but hurt the community of web designers that are determined to ensure that content is accessible to the largest possible audience.

This news has put a big dent in my trust of the WAI to champion the needs of accessible users. As such, I believe you are right to begin to strive for a better way based on sound judgement based on the needs of real users instead of standards that pander to the needs of corporate members.

I wish you and your Samurai band the very best of luck – “Banzai”.

posted at 09:13 am on May 23, 2006 by Andy Dennis

3 It's come on, but not progressed

I last read the working draft documents a couple of years back, but they certainly weren’t as weighty as you described in your article, so I can see that a lot has changed since then! When I read them, they appeared to be a re-ordering of the existing WCAG 1.0 guidelines, but now they have indeed changed most of it beyond recognition.

Just for a bit of flavour, I’ve attempted to read the new drafts, and the first thing that came to mind was “erm…” and a slight state of confusion. I can’t see how on Earth anyone is meant to implement these guidelines any more.

Hopefully, and with a lot of luck, the working group might pull their fingers out and produce a document that is both achievable by the web author and provides guidelines that will actually help those it was intended to.

I can’t see that myself, but we can only hope…

posted at 09:17 am on May 23, 2006 by Dylan Parry

4 Joe Clark versus the WCAG Working Group, again

Joe Clark has written another diatribe against WCAG 2.0, or is it against the WCAG Working Group? Here are some comments on half-truths and unsupported statements in his article.

Joe Clark writes: “The problem here is that standardistas already knew what to do to cover the same territory as those low-priority guidelines.” He ignores that WCAG is not just for today’s standardistas, so those ‘low-priority guidelines’ are not superfluous.

He also writes: “When compared against typical page dimensions in books, the three WCAG 2 documents, at 450 pages, exceed the size of each of the books published on the topic of WCAG 1.” He ignores that for each success criterion, “Understanding WCAG 2.0” repeats the text of the success criterion and each of the glossary entries used by the success criterion; Joe Clark does not take that into account. Also, the books on WCAG 1.0 only covered HTML, with a bit of CSS and (in one or two books) PDF, but hardly any JavaScript. When you cover more technologies, it’s hardly surprising you end up with longer documents.

Mr. Clark writes: “There’s a separate document, not updated since November 2005, covering HTML techniques. It isn’t included in this article.” The Working Group reviewed the 13 techniques in http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/ when writing the new techniques document; Mr. Clark ignores the fact that the new techniques document contains 49 HTML techniques (and many general techniques that are also applicable to HTML).

Joe Clark writes: “The Working Group, moreover, would like you to fill out a form, possibly using Excel, for each and every issue you disagree with. I advise you to simply send mail to public-comments-wcag20@w3.org (...)” The form is meant to enable faster processing of the comments, but Joe Clark doesn’t care about that.

He also writes: “The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I’ve ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.” These are accusations that readers of the article cannot check. Is this backstabbing for being removed from the Working Group (“actually ejected”)?

He continues: “Something’s wrong if many participants work in a climate of fear, as they tell me they do.” Again, statements that no reader can check.

He writes: “You’ll be able to define entire technologies as a ‘baseline,’ meaning anyone without that technology has little, if any, recourse to complain that your site is inaccessible to them.” Joe Clark used to accuse the WCAG WG of hating anything that goes beyond plain black-and-white HTML pages; now he accuses WCAG of allowing too much. He also ignores that baselines are not necessarily set by site developers, and that an unreasonable baseline is a valid reason for a complaint.

“The Working Group was and is unreasonably fixated on automated testing (...)” No, it avoids success criteria that rely on judgement calls.

posted at 10:32 am on May 23, 2006 by Christophe Strobbe

5 I'm interested enough now to read it myself!

Great article Joe. Big! I’ve only skimmed and clicked a few links, but I like what I’ve read so far and it’s good to know that someone has taken the time to dig deep and comment on this monster.

I’ll read it properly this evening, but one thing I picked up on is point 12 under “Less of a travesty, but still a failure”. You say…

“CSS layouts, particularly those with absolutely-positioned elements that are removed from the document flow, may simply be prohibited at the highest level. In fact, source order must match presentation order even at the lowest level.”

When I read the link you provided with this statement (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/#N100C7) I interpret it differently. To me it says ‘mark up your code semantically’. ‘Don’t use CSS to change the semantic meaning of your content’, which I think is a good thing and markedly different ton your interpretation of ‘CSS layouts.. may simply be prohibited…’ and ‘source order must match presentation order’.

The example given in the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 concerns the restyling of an unordered list to resemble a table of 2 columns with a heading at the top of each column. It explains that without the CSS, the intended meaning of the code os lost. It’s talking semantics, and not page flow.

But I think this only goes to reinforce your comment about the guidelines being open to misinterpretation. We’ve both read the same paragraph and taken two completely different meanings from it.

Thanks for stirring up my interest in a guideline that I’ve been putting off reading for months now.

posted at 10:56 am on May 23, 2006 by Steven Tew

6 Well researched, Joe. You certainly keep things interesting!

Joe,

Just wanted to say I enjoyed your article. Although I don’t agree with all your conclusions, I must say I’m impressed that you were able to summarize many of the expressed concerns regarding WCAG 2.0 in an understandable, human way.

I believe WCAG 2.0 is a good framework. The challenge is that it is outcome-based, not method-determined like WCAG 1.0. In order to have an outcome-based standard, it is necessary to have two things: 1) a set rigidly defined definitions (as you aptly point out), and 2) metrics for compliance – meaning you actually must measure wheather each outcome is met, and to what degree – regardless of the method or technology used.

It’s clear you believe WCAG 2.0 does not have these attributes. The WCAG WG believes it does. Like you, I believe the market will ultimately decide the issue.

-Hon. Mark D. Urban, Chair North Carolina Governor’s Advocacy Council for Persons with Disabilities.

posted at 11:27 am on May 23, 2006 by Mark Urban

7 A Frustrating State of Affairs

@Christope Strobbe: Clearly you don’t agree with this article, which is fair enough. However, despite picking up on a few points in the article, I notice that you don’t actually refute the central argument that WCAG 2.0 fails in it’s aims and objectives, and doesn’t meet the needs of developers or those with disabilities.

@General Comments: Personally I find this to be a particularly frustrating situation, as the likes of the WCAG Working Group are supposed to be promoting and encouraging the development of accessible websites. Instead they appear to be hindering those that wish to “do the right thing”, and supplying those who couldn’t care less with ample reason to do nothing.

I spent a fair propotion of the article wondering whether it would be better, as a community, to turn our backs on WCAG 2.0 and produce an pragmatic, useable alternative ourselves. As such, the closing remarks about the WCAG Samurai were most welcomed.

Thank you Joe, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of the Samurai’s labours.

posted at 11:43 am on May 23, 2006 by Stephen Lewis

9 So many problems, so few answers

I read this with interest, because I would like to be more accessible with what I build, even though my projects rarely if ever require it. Based on Joe’s review, I can’t imagine slogging through all that stuff.

There’s nothing I hate more than going to the W3C site to look something up. Having watched them since their inception, I can’t believe an organization can move so slow. While their intentions are good, they seem ineffective at best as it relates to a web author who has to be in the trenches every day.

Think about it – where do you get all your real info when you need it? It’s not the W3C - at least not for me.

What do we as developers need? We need a clear and concise set of guidelines to follow in order to make things as accessible as possible. And nothing the W3C or WCAG seems to produce is either one of those – not unless you are some kind of uber geek – which I apparently am not.

I suppose we can hope that the usual suspects will take the mountain of documents the WCAG produced here and make some sort of sense of it for us. But that shouldn’t be necessary – shouldn’t that be the job of the WCAG in the first place?

The toughest thing for developers in the trenches is to bring both standards and accessiblity to projects where everything is evaluated on how much business sense it makes. I have been fighting for standards for years, and it’s still tough. People still don’t get it – and trust me, accessibility isn’t even on their radar screens yet.

This doesn’t help. If WE can’t get our you know what together, how can we present it to those we need to? Well, we can’t.

As for Joe vs. the WCAG. When I founded www.maccaws.org in 2002, Joe graciously joined up and wanted to help. We butted heads a bit (and half of it was my fault, trust me). I only bring this up to say to you Joe – recognize that you can come on very strong and aggressively – and that hurts your cause, regardless of what your professional credentials are.

Even though I was half in the wrong, things were so tense between us that the relationship could not continue. I just have to wonder if something similar happened here. I think that especially on the internet where you communicate in so many forms other than face to face, that courtesy and respect are paramount. It needs to be given to be received.

And I also realize having directed Maccaws.org for a year, that getting things done with people all over the place (who have full time jobs as well) on such huge issues is difficult. So I do cut the W3C some slack – but only some.

If all we have to work with are old guidelines that are understandable but out of date, or new ones that are supposedly up to date but not understandable, how can we push accessiblity forward?

In the end, it was the web development community as a whole that really did the heavy lifting in moving standards awareness forward. They did it via pushing it on projects (Like Doug Bowman on the famous Wired redesign) and grass roots evangelism. As a group, we just decided we were going to use standards, and we did – and we do – and it caught on.

It’s going to have to be the same way with accessiblity. It’s not going to get done any other way, and that means there is lot of work in blogs and projects to be done, and it’s going to take a long time, just like it did for standards. That’s the way I see it. Ramble mode off.

posted at 02:22 pm on May 23, 2006 by Tom Dell'Aringa

10 Re: Joe Clark versus the WCAG Working Group, again

You know, I like Joe, really! Oh, we’ve tussled in the past (via emails), but he’s a straight shooter and tells it like it is, even if he takes little care to avoid rubbing it in people’s noses. But that’s Joe – love him or leave him.

But as far as working with the W3C, I must step up and comment, in particular to the point raised by Mr. Strobbe, who wrote,

“These are accusations that readers of the article cannot check”.

I can attest to knowing a regular participant to the WG discussion list who has been shut down and ignored on more than one occaison, and I personally have been dismissed by other working groups within the W3C (for me, it was the XHTML 2 authors, who directly contravened the W3C published dispute mechanism – however that’s another story for another day, but you can start here – www.wats.ca/show.php?contentid=47 ). So the behavior and treatment described by Joe is not unknown any time you strongly voice an opinion counter to the internal W3C herd.

As a long time “web accessibility” guy myself, I have to concur with Joe – the WCAG 2 is unworkable, fatally flawed, and will never receive the required up-take within the developer community required to make it useful. Oh, and it does nothing to improve web accessibility – something Joe has amply illustrated. I may not always agree with Joe’s “style”, but this time he’s bang on the money!

I too lend my support and encouragement to the WCAG Samurai (although, Joe, I hope that there will be some form of public vetting at some point in time).

posted at 02:58 pm on May 23, 2006 by John Foliot