Revising the accessibility guidelines
Our recommendation for clients is that they should aim for small incremental updates on their website, maybe every three months - it avoids creating major upheavals that have to work as soon as the changes are implemented. This strategy isn’t going to work when you are developing standards as there needs to be more stability for others to be able to apply them. The World Wide Web Constortium (W3C) appears to have gone to the other extreme though as it is now 8 years since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) became a recommendation - sometimes you might see references to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) or the accessibility levels specified (AA, Double-A, etc.).
That’s no change since 1999! At that stage we were just discovering the joys of Internet Explorer 5.0 and the Netscape browser was stuck on version 4 (as the Mozilla project that produced Firefox got under way). The first graphical browser had only came out in 1993. So we’re talking about the early days of web design and development when the accessibility working group would have been drafting the recommendation.
In practice this has meant that the guidelines are now addressing problems that are no longer applicable (who after all still uses ASCII art?); new technologies aren’t addressed; old techniques are retained even though better options are now available; and badly drawn-up checkpoints remain on the tick lists for compliance. So it is possible to create an accessible website that doesn’t comply with the WCAG 1.0, and a website that conforms that isn’t as accessible as it could be.
The W3C have been working on a revised standard (since 2002), but there was a furore last year when they made the proposed standard available for ‘final’ comments - for example Joe Clarke’s article To Hell with WCAG 2. Out of that an independent group known as the WCAG Samurai decided to work on providing a set of errata for the current WCAG 1.0 standard - removing parts that didn’t work and bringing it in line with 2007. Their draft version was made public last week, with a final version promised by the end of the month.
After being the butt of numerous April Fools’ announcements, a revised WCAG2 working draft was released last month, with at least another version promised before moving into the final stages of the recommendation process. No deadline has been set. In fact the W3C site states WAI anticipates WCAG 2.0 may be completed in 2007
[my emphasis]. This time round though the draft has been met with more appreciative comments.
I suspect that the WCAG Samurai work might not become a widely used benchmark in its own right. Standards have come from the grassroots in the past, but I would think that there would need to be more of a groundswell of support and lobbying to have say the UK government adopt the WCAG Samurai Errata as their next standard (and from there be taken up by the rest of the public sector).
Instead its legacy might be that it will serve as a source of best practice techniques to be implemented by those of us concerned about accessibility; that it was part of the barrage of criticism that has led to the improved WCAG 2.0 draft and hopefully that it will also serve as a reminder when the W3C starts on the next cycle of amendments.
In the meantime it’s worth starting to look at the WCAG 2.0 drafts - particularly the Quick Reference and Comparison with WCAG 1.0 documents.
