11 Disappointing News

Thanks for the update Joe. I had high hopes for an improvement over WCAG 1 — but it doesn’t look like we’ll see it from WCAG 2.

It seems inevitable that if WCAG 2 isn’t useful and relevant, there will be other groups publishing their own guidelines. In particular, Section 508 in the US and it’s equivalents in other parts of the world may have been based on the WCAG, but it’s possible they’ll continue to develop in a positive direction.

posted at 04:11 pm on May 23, 2006 by Stuart Robertson

13 "It avoids success criteria that rely on judgement

Memo to Mr. Strobbe:
Web Accessibility is ALL ABOUT judgment calls – judging/understanding the semantic logic of your text, what is the appropriate alt text for your image (not as easy as it seems), knowing when (and when not) to use tables and lists, knowing when and how to use appropriate headers, etc. etc. etc. Web Accessibility is about logic, reason, understanding of different perspectives – it takes a human brain to do it right, and thus by it’s very nature interpretive and subjective. Web Accessibility is NOT about getting a bunch of check marks on a spreadsheet and a little badge that you can paste on your website at the end – automated checking tools to the contrary.

Your one response to this point seems to succinctly illustrates how much the WCAG 2 doesn’t get it…

posted at 05:00 pm on May 23, 2006 by John Foliot

14 Untitled

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.

I don’t fully agree with this, and while I do see the problem with the baseline concept, I don’t believe it is as bad as you make it out to be.

There a major difference between the statements: “This site is accessible” and “This site is accessible to users, whose UAs meet the baseline requirements”. While the latter will theoretically apply to any document conforming to WCAG 2.0, the former is a much broader statment and, as it does not define exactly who the site is accessible to, one can only assume it means “This site is accessible [to everyone]”.

If the baseline is set too high, users will have “recourse to complain that your site is inaccessible to them”. The problem is that there is no guidelines on specifying a realistic, accessible baseline and that means the concerns about it being set too high by organisations are indeed valid.

You can’t use offscreen positioning to add labels (e.g., to forms) that only some people, like users of assistive technology, can perceive. Everybody has to see them.

I seem to be interpreting the specification differently from you, with regards to this issue. WCAG 2.0 states:

The intent of this success criterion is to ensure that information and relationships that are implied by visual or auditory formatting are preserved when the presentation format changes. […] The purpose of this success criterion is to ensure that when such relationships are perceivable to one set of users, those relationships can be made to be perceivable to all.

Not everybody has to see the text labels, there is nothing there that says they can’t be hidden off screen. What I believe it is saying is that the same meaning needs to be conveyed to all users, regardless of the presentation.

E.g. For a visual user, the meaning may be conveyed through the visual layout, colours, icons, etc, but for an aural user, for example, the same meaning may be conveyed by speaking the text label.

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.

Again, I seem to be interpreting the spec differently. Nothing in the spec says the presentation order much match the source order, it simply states that the same meaning must be conveyed to the user regardless of the presentation.

It’s ok to use absolute positioning (or any other layout method) to alter the presentational ordering, as long as the meaning of the content is not altered.

Regarding the WCAG Samurai, I’m a bit disappointed that the work will take place behind closed doors and urge you to reconsider the opennes of the development process. However, I think it’s only fair that you and the other invited members be given a fair chance to show that your model can and does work; and I’ll await the results of your work before I reach any conclusions on the issue.

posted at 05:35 pm on May 23, 2006 by Lachlan Hunt

15 needs

Joe is right, it shouldn’t come down to anyone’s style (hopefully I didn’t give the impression I meant that, I don’t).

As a guy in the trenches (like the rest of us) I’ll tell you what I need. I need a reference that I can turn to to help me build accessible code. It has to be succinct and to the point. All the important stuff needs to be floating on the top.

If I want to dig, fine – that can be there too. But the stuff I need to get the job done needs to be front and center and implementable in the current state of things.

Can the WCAG deliver that? Apparently not. Who can deliver that so people like me can use it to make the web a better place? And deliver it so it makes business sense to silly companies that label themselves “web 2.0” (not just companies who are receiving government funds and are thus required to comply – and who don’t anyway) – so I can actually implement the stuff in what is becoming a more and more complicated client side experience.

To me, that’s the 64-dollar question.

posted at 06:15 pm on May 23, 2006 by Tom Dell'Aringa

17 Source Order

»the text appears visually in the browser in a different order than in the markup«

… which means it isn’t limited to absolute positioning, but in fact includes (or rather excludes) Any Order Columns as described over at P.I.E.

posted at 06:42 pm on May 23, 2006 by Tomas Caspers

18 Who are we trying to help?

As much as their is a supposed “climate of fear” in WCAG WG I’d contest that even in writing this comment I am fearful of Joey’s reply…if he’ll even stoop as low as me ;)

Look! Nobody set out to do bad work. For example, Microsoft did not set out to make our PCs hang and make programs bloated and ugly. So it is healthy that we have watchdogs.

WCAG WG is full of many dedicated people who are trying to do their best. Joey C here in his own way is also doing diliengent work to make sure we have good standardsan dhe should be commended for that.

Remember standards should be firm guidelines to be realistically followed not nasty rules to be obeyd [in my real world opinion].

Making the world a better place is a “bit by bit” process and not a “one fell swoop” process.

And finally…

In the usability world we tend to make testing and the inclusion of actual end users a huge priority at ALL phases in guideline (and site) development. Perhaps that message could be taken up by another group so as to augement all the approaches to Web Content Accessibility?

[thanks for reading my view on this admirable work]

posted at 07:29 pm on May 23, 2006 by Gordon Montgomery

19 e.g.

So, should e.g. be in an abbr element with a language of latin to expand to “exempli gratia”, or should it be replaced with “for example”? Needless to say, I’m a bit curious what the WCAG2’s stance on this would be.

posted at 10:07 pm on May 23, 2006 by Brian LePore

20 Joe, I've been waiting for your call

Joe wrote:
“In the discussion below, links to and within these documents were difficult to finesse, given their numerous, but still insufficient, fragment identifiers. In some cases—paging Steve Faulkner!—no sensible title attribute was apparent.”

Are you and your invisible friends going to explain to us earthlings how the title attribute content can be made keyboard accessible in current user agents?

Apart from our personal spat about title attributes, I appreciate and agree with a lot of what you have to say here (not that my opinion counts for much).

posted at 01:06 am on May 24, 2006 by steve faulkner

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