Accessibility Wakeup Call
I’ve just finished reading an article by Joe Clark discussing the new version the accessibility guidelines for developing web content, WCAG 2. These will theoretically become the new baseline for establishing whether online resources are accessible. Very scary reading.
The purpose of publishing a specification like this is that everyone can arrive at a shared understanding of the measures that should be taken to ensure that web content is accessible. This makes it essential to produce a document which can be easily understood and applied by the web development community.
I would recommend reading Joe’s article for a thorough breakdown of the problems with the documents which have been made public so far. I think the fact that there is an accompanying document titled ‘Understanding WCAG 2′ is a statement in itself.
It looks like the new specification is far too cryptic to really be of benefit to anyone, and if developers cannot understand the measures they should be taking to ensure the integrity of the work they produce, then why bother publishing it?
I too have read the article – painful reading, but from someone like Joe it’s likely to be fairly on the money. I look forward to seeing the output from the the taskforce he talked about creating.
It’s interesting to get such a contrasting view to stories like this: http://www.out-law.com/page-6946 , where Sir Tim talks about WCAG2 in the same breath as improvements to accessibility.
J.
Comment by Jake, May 24, 2006 @ 2:48 pm
Having dipped briefly into the public docs, I would say that Joe’s article looks fairly accurate. I suppose the Director of the W3C would have to publicly support the output of the WAI.
I’m looking forward to getting a few different opinions from the session at @Media next month.
Comment by Oli, May 24, 2006 @ 3:14 pm