hultberg.org: LinkLog

We need to make Accessibility Guidelines more... ...accessible?

It may sound weird, but I definitely think this article's author has a point.

The article is awfully long. I haven't read it in its entirety myself yet. But I will, during the weekend.

As is now quite widely known among indie developers and virtually unknown everywhere else, websites are properly created in accordance with published accessibility standards. The chief source for those standards is the set of “recommendations” by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative. These Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were last officially updated in 1999.

WCAG 1.0 was terribly hard to understand and learn, and we need to make sure the guidelines develop in such a way that they will be easier to understand and use. Then perhaps finally they will be.

A new revision of the guidelines, 2.0, is being written. The development process is going slowly and is in danger of recapitulating many of the errors of 1.0 - unrealistic guidelines divorced from real-world web development that are at once too vague and too specific.

This is an interesting and important topic. Hopefully I will have time and opportunity to take part in this. We already make WAI an integral part of our work at Infogate (as much as we can and understand anyway) even though it is not (yet...) demanded by law in Sweden.

If you choose to make standards-compliant websites, inevitably you will have to follow the guidelines. It’s foreseeable that you could be legally required to follow WCAG 2.0. You could opt into following the guidelines or they could be foisted upon you. You thus have an enlightened self-interest in ensuring the new guidelines actually make sense. Moreover, we simply need more contributors.

I am going to read the full article during the weekend and see if we in any way can contribute to this during the coming year.

How to Save Web Accessibility from Itself: A List Apart

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