Discuss: To Hell with WCAG 2
by Joe Clark
- Editorial Comments
42 In the real world....
Speaking as a average web developer…
The confusion that the WCAG (1 or 2) generates is so ornerous that regular developers like me will NEVER be applying them, even if we are aware of the need. The majority of our clients don’t even have accessibility on their radar. AND if accessibility means generating three to four times the content in order to be ‘accessible” to all, they never will have it on their radar. Do you think ANY content provider other then government-based ones are going to develop alternate content for those at a lower reading level?…
What we need is “Accessibility for the real world” if you want designers to actually make their sites more accessible. CSS standards actually made our lives easier, so we went through the pain of learning them. If the W3C expects designers to use accessibility standards, there needs to be clear guidelines, and, it needs to be cost-effective for the clients.
posted at 12:24 am on May 25, 2006 by Karl Jacobs
43 Education and Information
Thank you Joe. I was wondering what was happening in the world of that particular working group. A previous job was a web developer at my old university. It was exceedingly difficult to get the various IT groups, heads of schools and uni beaurocracy to become interested in accessibility – this is despite physical access around the university considered a high priority.
I’ve been harping on about the value of web standards, semantics and accessibility for around five years to the younger developers I’ve been in contact with and it has only been in the last two years or so (even one?) that people have started taking up the cause in a big way. While accessibility might not always be at the front of their minds, there has been success in getting the foundations of these – standards and semantics – in at the start of the development process. To see that this has been totally ignored is not good. Further, as with all standards, clear and concise instructions are a key requirement. I’m yet to read the working groups work, but will with great interest.
Finally, one last comment. A designer is not a developer, but a developer can be a designer.
posted at 06:09 am on May 25, 2006 by Joel Courtney
44 Need for clarity more important than ever
As someone who provides training to Web developers and designers about accessibility, I’ve followed the progression of WCAG 2.0 quite closely and with growing dismay. I’m relatively happy with the four principles around which the guidelines are organized (though levels of perception, operability, understanding and robustness will differ widely), but the details will first confuse and then dishearten those responsible for their implementation.
I’ve always emphasized techniques that make sites accessible on a practical level, rather than just ticking WCAG 1.0 boxes and hoping for the best. But WCAG 1.0 were the starting point, not least because of their importance as a de facto standard adopted by (UK) government and the public sector.
Showing learners that there are straightforward steps they can take today to improve the accessibility of their sites is rewarding. That these methods can be shown to meet the requirements of most of WCAG 1.0 is a happy outcome. Unless WCAG 2.0 can be straightened out, that outcome will disappear and we’ll find ourselves again in the situation where all but the most committed designers and developers will turn away from accessibility in droves.
posted at 03:09 pm on May 25, 2006 by Owen Gregory
45 But what about the DDA?
For many clients the primary reason that accessibility is considered to be important is unfortunately nothing to do with providing access to sites.
There are a significant number of companies who want to avoid scenario’s such as the Sydney Olympics court case. Here in the UK such a case would involve the DDA, and from what I understand the case would most likely be centred around whether the site complies with the WCAG guidelines. There seems to be an ever increasing gap between “real” accessibility and sites that pass WCAG checkpoints (and therefore Bobby).
I commend Joe for writing such a fantastic article and I think the Samurai will help enormously to help make sites actually accessible but the WCAG 2 simply cannot be ignored.
posted at 03:34 pm on May 25, 2006 by Julian Guy
46 The legality of it all
A(nother?) view from Australia:
Gian (whom Joe references in this article) and Bruce McGuire (of IBM/SOCOG arse-kicking fame, now working for HREOC – the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission) presented a few weeks ago in Sydney, roundly slating the guidelines pretty much as Joe has done here.
Gian outlined numerous examples of the corporates using politics, 5am Australian time meetings and so on, not to mention “cease and desist” legal letters and booting people off the group.
The motive suggested was that the corporates are looking to water down the guidelines as much as possible, giving them freedom to produce whatever code they like.
This makes sense for the corporates economically: if there are no clear cut, concise standards to develop to, it’s a lot harder for smaller enterprises/individuals to compete. See the browser wars and their proprietary code issues around 1999 for an example of this logic …
Another example is the new “baseline” criteria – a site only has to be as accessible as the technology allows. eg. a pure Flash site 3-5 years ago would be deemed as meeting guidelines … as Flash didn’t have any accessibility features. Not much of an incentive for Macromedia etc to develop accessible applications huh?
The semi-good news, from the sounds of it, is that there’s no guarantee that HREOC (and hopefully legal bodies in other countries) will accept WCAG 2.0 as guidelines for legal compliance. Because the language is vague and does not refer to specific technologies, it’d be pretty hard to argue one or the other in court.
Bravo.
posted at 05:21 pm on May 25, 2006 by Ian Stalvies
47 Unambiguous Parsing of Table Elements
Taylor Mathewson wrote:
<table><tr><td>hello world</td></tr></table>
Most browsers assume a <tbody> between the <table> and <tr>. However if one doesn’t, it’s our problem. This means scripted browser sniffing and manipulation of (X)HTML (either server- or client-side).
In HTML 4.01, the tbody element is always present. However, both it’s start- and end-tags are optional. Any browser that does not imply the tbody element for the sample code you provided is broken, there is no ambiguity in that code. (In reality, this applies to any (X)HTML document served as text/html).
However, strictly speaking, for XHTML (due to XML parsing rules and the desire for compatibility with common authoring practices) the tbody element was made optional. For an XHTML document served as XML, the tbody element will not be implied—again, there is no ambiguity.
posted at 05:42 pm on May 25, 2006 by Lachlan Hunt
48 PAS78
Sorry, didn’t read [em]all[/em] the comments so this may have been mentioned already…
PAS78 ‘Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites’ published by the BSI in march this year is exactly what it says on the tin.
Commisioned by the Disability Rights Commison from the British Standards Institute and primarily authored by the likes of Julie Howell (RNIB) and representitives from organisations like Abilitynet, The BBC, IBM, The Cabinet Office and others.
Aimed at the people who pay for websites rather than the people that build them it draws heavily from WCAG 1 and no mention at all is made of WCAG 2.
If (as is hoped) this document is successful and organisations in the UK pick up on it and use it as the basis for there future stance on accessibility then WCAG 2 may not be needed.
I hope.
PAS78s language is clear and consise and combined with WCAG1 covers any accessibility requirement that any website may have.
Yes, WCAG 1 has its flaws and needs updating, lets wait and see what the samuri offer ;-)
PAS78 is available from http://www.bsi-global.com/ICT/PAS78/index.xalter
posted at 06:20 pm on May 25, 2006 by Jim Barter
49 Some ammunition for the next meeting
I hadn’t got around to perusing the WCAG 2.0 yet, but it’s already being touted where I work (a major university) as a panacaea for all web accessibility ills by the department reponsible for making sure we comply with such things.
I’m both happy (and obviously not so happy) to see that if falls very much short of its lofty goals, and in some cases is actually making the situation worse, especially for those of us who code to standards as a matter of course.
posted at 06:53 pm on May 25, 2006 by Matt Burns
50 Order of document
Thus, it is important not to rely on CSS for a visual-only layout which differs from the source code or programmatically-determined reading order…. [In t]he following example… the text appears visually in the browser in a different order than in the markup.
I think this could have been a good point. Specifying “CSS” suggests that the people who wrote it don’t really understand what they are talking about. Yes, it is possible to have things appear all over the place with CSS – but a much bigger problem is people who use tables to change the apparent order of things. This can have a much more serious impact on the accessibility of a site than someone who uses CSS to put the end-of-document navigation bar down the left of the screen.
posted at 10:07 pm on May 25, 2006 by Stephen Down
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41 Untitled
According to the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines,
So if an author wishes to capitalize on past accessibility efforts but does not wish to make the transition to WCAG 2.0, would the conformance claim “Materials conform to WCAG 1.0 Level Double-A” allow him the flexibility to do so, or does such a creation or modification disqualify the conformance statement?
posted at 12:11 am on May 25, 2006 by Emily Smit