WCAG 2.0 – Web Accessibility and your role
It seems that the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is on the verge of releasing a whole new set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines called WCAG 2.0. With numerous changes in place, it now seems that the whole set of guidelines that many of us have worked so hard to implement are now not sure what the best way to implement accessibility is.
“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of issues and recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This document contains principles, guidelines, and success criteria that define and explain the requirements for making Web-based information and applications accessible. “Accessible” means usable to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these.â€?
Whether this new set of guidelines is the new forward-looking, non-technology-dependant vision of accessibility it claims to be or whether it is just another document here to slow down corporate to small web agencies. Perhaps at some point these discussions will include real people with real disabilities who, for some reason, have very little to do with this, but currently that doesn’t seem to be the case.
However, the new guidelines are, in fact, a work in progress and not formally approved yet. It’s not the easiest read at the moment, in fact if you find yourself reading all of it in one sitting you have very good patience.
There’s always something to be said for open discussion like mailing lists and actual accomplishment via showcase web sites. So perhaps groups like the WCAG Samurai (www.wcagsamurai.org) wouldn’t have to exist if the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) committee didn’t tend to move and operate like a sumo wrestler itself.
Remember WCAG 2.0, like WCAG 1.0 before it, is a set of guidelines.
So what shall we do whilst we wait for the guidelines? Well, those of us that actually make websites and care about making them useful and accessible to real people are just going to have to go on doing the best we can on our own, like we’ve pretty much been doing. We will continue to use our experience to think about what we’re doing and how we can make it as useful as possible to all users. That’s what we’ve been doing and what we should continue achieving. We’re hopefully already showing the big company sites how easy it is to do, Roger Johansson’s article on “Google, meet web standards� shows how easy it is to creates accessible standards based sites with just a little bit of thought and forward thinking.
For more information on this subject, heres a good WCAG 2.0 link from this years @media 2006 where the accessibility gurus of Bruce Lawson, Patrick Lauke and Gez Lemon try to explain the finer points to the audience, with not the clearest of explanations, but good for the broad understanding of the subject.
