Discuss: To Hell with WCAG 2

by Joe Clark

91 Just a little confused…

Hi Joe,

Great article, but there are a couple of conclusions which don’t seem to follow from the links you provided.

11. 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.

From the document:

…ensure that information and relationships that are implied by visual or auditory formatting are preserved when the presentation format changes…

This doesn’t seem to mean that labels must be visible to all users; rather, it talks about implied relationships, which could be through visual positioning, context, labels or other cues. By this standard, moving a label off-screen is often legitimate as the only way of preserving an implied visual order or structure which is also provided for non-visual or non-CSS browsers.

Someone has already commented on point 12; the linked section specifies that CSS should not be used to provide structural information which could be provided in the markup. To my untrained eyes, that means you should present content in the most appropriate order to establish semantics. Specifically, this condition is failed when:

…the modified layout changes the meaning of the content.

Placing a navigation list at the bottom of your source and using CSS to position it at the top or side of your page would not change the semantics.

Your tenth point appears to indicate a particularly nasty omission. However, the immediately succeeding recommendation seems to address the issue of unwieldy navigation (and, incidentally, suggests that basic navigation should be accessible from any page). It is notable that this guideline is actually counted as a level 2 recommendation, while “skip navigation” links are level 1, which strikes me as odd.

I might be missing something, and if so please correct me! Point well taken that you are exposing vagueness in addition to actual flaws, but these specific sections seemed quite clear to me.

posted at 02:58 am on June 6, 2006 by Jordan Gray

92 As an aside

If it were superbly written, it would probably be a lot less than 500 pages!

Unfortunately, as Joe points out, this document doesn’t address standards-compliant web developers. People who build web pages don’t need an exposition about “web units,” because in this context it already has a perfectly established meaning. Personally, if I ever feel a burning need to follow the WCAG 2 standard, I’ll wait until someone writes a document targetted at my audience, because this draft is certainly not concise, elegant or aimed at developers like myself.

posted at 03:09 am on June 6, 2006 by Jordan Gray

93 Giving up

I have given up trying to understand the section about positioning of elements. I think my interpretation is more plausible but am not willing to stake an unencoded ampersand on it. I will advance the opinion that WCAG Working Group only half-understands CSS layouts and actually would kind of like to make them illegal, or at least the nice-looking ones. That is, however, merely an opinion.

posted at 01:53 am on June 7, 2006 by Joe Clark

94 the froggy's can talk too

Hi joe,

We read attentively your article and thought it will a good idea to start a real WCAG 2.0 discussion in french community. Your article is the perfect starting point for that but unfortunatly he was in english only, so we decided to translate it like Alistapart copyright permit it, to make it easy to understand for french people.

This work was published yesterday on our three blogs :
http://www.webonorme.net/ressources/accessibilite/to-hell-with-wcag2/index.htm
http://www.blog.webatou.be/traduction.htm
http://www.fairytells.net/wcag2/traduction.htm

with two presentation : The first is the translation alone, we tried our best efforts to be sure to translate your meaning and style. The second is the same text with our notes without alter your meaning, we thought it’s more clear to put them with the context of translation to avoid to be misunderstood and be incentive to start a good discussion.

And, finaly a classical comment’s page is also available for our visitors to comment our notes and the wcag 2 process generaly. If there is some comment about your article, we will try to translate it and post it regulary here.
http://www.webonorme.net/ressources/accessibilite/to-hell-with-wcag2/commentaires.htm

here it is our essentials notes on your article :

We think that WCAG 2.0 is an improvment related to the WCAG 1 restrictions, especially about new technologies and web usages even your’e right when you wrote that WCAG 2.0 break the usual WCAG 1.0 practice and that this version of WCAG 2.0 can’t be a legislative reference. The whole document is to obscur to be a real efficient tool and need some rewrite, improvment and application documentation.

Your notes about particual points are a good demonstration for this requirements and some others are a bit more discutable.

1) the notion a page and site are now becoming more and more versatile, is there realy some page in ajax application for exemple or a RSS syndication web application is realy a site ?

2) Even html validation will not a requirement, it wil, in same time, the clear and simple way to be sure to have an “unambigous” structure
and it’s clearly written in the how to succed document with the point 2. Validating Web units. In the other hand we think it was better if they clearely write it on the guideline even in the level 3 and there DOM validation method is a nightmare for the common user.

3)We didn’t read nothing about an authorization to uses layout tables, the reference explain that it will not a failure. The succes criterion 1.3 is a clear requirement to uses layout CSS techniques and the guideline 1.3.3 a garanty of not allowing the bad nested tables

5) We consider that the “baseline” concept is a good way to determinated an operationnal area from a web site related to the intention and we are conscient that it can be a ubject of interpretation and that it will be a little complicated to manage it. But its a solution out of WCAG 1 area and it was a strong problem for our practice, our clients and finaly for all the web development.

6) in theory this was a good idea, you can exclude a part of your site, you must clearly say it and you can’t include the non accessible element on an accessible part of your site. Unfortunalty, the document is unclear they say too that you cannot exclude a particular type of content and in the exemple they exlude only the video. it’s the perfect demonstration that this point is a open door to everything.

9) the podcast are not multimedia but there are non textl content so the WCAG say clearly” For non-text content that presents information, such as charts, diagrams, audio recordings, pictures, and animations, text alternatives can make the same information available in a form that can be rendered through any modality (for example, visual, auditory or tactile). Short and long text alternatives can be used as needed to convey the information in the non-text content. Note that pre-recorded audio-only and pre-recorded video-only files are covered here”. So the text alternative is required. For the slideshow you are right, bad for flicker but user need to have an alternative for all the picture, the question is synchronised or not?

12) We think you misunderstood the subject of this requirement. The absolute properties isn’t forbidden, never, but it is forbidden to uses it rather than structural markup when the modified layout changes the meaning of the content

14)The alternate version solution is not a good way, we all know that, but i prefere to suggest at owner of a full flash website to make and alternate version and update flash to make it keyboard usable than forget accessibility and forget Flash because he will forget me.

Here it is the essentials quotes on our notes.

With our best regards A.Levy, J-P Villain, M.Brunel

posted at 02:11 am on June 8, 2006 by levy aurelien

95 Probably too late to comment on this but--

I think Joe Clark is right. WCAG2 in the core issues is a step backwards not forwards.

I’m merely a webmaster, although an unashamed standards and web accessibility advocate but, I had vague feelings that something went wrong in the last few years of work on the WCAG when two friends of mine, one of whom was blind, mailed me and asked me to submit comments. They said I had some experience in the trenches and would bring some needed reality to the ivory tower.

After finally dragging the rest of the Web kicking and screaming to a world where CSS is finally an accepted technology and people actually care about good ALT and TITLE values, WCAG2 tells us to stop worrying about it?!

Argh!

posted at 01:36 am on June 9, 2006 by Pace Arko

96 WCAG2 is not assessable

Perhaps the reason people are reacting so strongly to this article can be explained by the assumption that the WCAG2 documents can’t be made sense of. This article is one of the few articles which interpret the guidelines in such a way informed developers can actually have an opinion about it.

If there was a ‘WCAG2 web interpretation reference’ which would take the WCAG2 and interpret EACH PART into something assessable it would be much more approachable to developers..

This however can only be build on a WCAG2 that can be assessed itself, even with optional incomprehensible language included. That doesn’t seem to be the case according to this article and I won’t be able to find out otherwise. How can we use something if we can’t assess it properly.

posted at 11:38 am on June 15, 2006 by Sander van Dragt

97 We don't need WCAG/WAI tell us how....

As with a lot of standards, the gap between theory and practice has to be narrowed by us web-pioneers. The ones who actualy have to build the stuff. We’ve got so far now with Markup, Stylesheets and are on the right path with behavior. Defacto standards, pragmatic interpretations and best practices are the way to go. We can and should take command by reversing the roles played in this poor accessibility-soap. WASP-accessibility group could participate in this. Let me tickle you with some of my thoughts. Take a peek at http://blog.webbforce.nl

posted at 01:02 pm on June 15, 2006 by Marc van den Dobbelsteen

98 This is appalling

It seems to me that the people who are putting this together are either bad web designers covering their own backsides or have been “persuaded” by large companies who can’t be bothered to comply. There’s certainly something rotten about the whole thing.

posted at 08:50 pm on June 16, 2006 by Gill Lucraft