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W3C Web Accessibility Standards 2.0
WildFire42 writes "The W3C has released their W3C WCAG 2.0 Standards (that's World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for a request for comments before it becomes a standard. I've discovered quite a variety of geeks here that may access web content in a variety of methods, from screen readers, to Braille displays, to open captioning on streamed videos, etc. Web accessibility is still in its infancy (relatively), but is becoming a concern for more people every day. Once the WCAG 2.0 becomes a recognized standard (probably sometime in 2004), it will most likely be a concern for web developers, but the W3C still wants input from the public, to get a feel of the kinds of disabilities that have not received enough focus in the 1.0 standards. More information on the Interest Group is at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative page. Your input and insight is needed!"
If you want to test if your webpage is accessible to visually deficient people, you can ask Bobby to scan it and analyse it. Best accessibility report tool in town, I use it on all my pages.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Actually, this is a standard on how to create pages so people will be able to access the page even if they for some reason can't use bleeding-edge graphical browsers (blindness) or can't hear the audio of Flash animations / audio clips.
It's a standard that tells you _how_ to use the already existing standards (such as the alt property on tags or providing transcripts to audio feeds).
Then again, I'm sure you already knew this, and thus posted this as an AC. Still, people may not be as smart as you, so I'll post it anyways =D
The W3C is a consortium that includes the makers of IE, Netscape, Opera, and Safari. Check their About page and the member list.
(I know, I've been trolled, but some might find the clarification useful.)
On what do you base this claim? In my experience, most pages that attempt to comply with W3C Recommendations use less bandwidth than the non-compliant tag soup that dominates the Web. Tag soup pages generally include useless images and bloated markup (<font>, unnecessary tables) that standards-based pages don't have.
In the US, it's Section508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
.com crash. The vast market of consumers don't care if a site is animated to holy heck and streams ambient music anymore - It's not going to sell your product or content any better anymore than a well-designed but accessible/usable site.
EVERYBODY and their brother gets up-in-arms about having the government legislate their web design. Nobody bothers to read this stuff.
So here're my bullet points:
1) s508 compliance it's only required if you're a federal government agency or contractor, and even then there are some exceptions.
2) C'mon people, it's really *not* that hard to comply. Got ALT tags? You're halfway there. Lose the 7 layers of nested tables and nobody'll complain.
3) it's 2003 now - the era of overdesigned websites ended with the
4) A site doesn't have to be ugly and nonvisual to be accessible. Proper use of CSS can give you a fantastic site that degrades nicely into a screen-reader, brailler, etc.
5) Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?
6) There are several hundred million users worldwide who consider themselves disabled in some way. If you're selling things, would you shut your door to 200,000,000 potential customers because it's inconvenient for you to serve them?
7) A plus to an accessible website is that it will almost always degrade well to other browsers - especially things like wireless devices and phones. Make your site accessible, and you've gone a long way towards making it mobile as well.
8) Jeffrey Zeldman's new book "Designing with Web Standards" is an excellent resource. He demonstrates how to use current standards like XHTML, CSS to create websites that are complaint with standards, work well on the vast majority of browsers, are attractive, usable, and accessible. Definitely worth checking out, as is his website, www.zeldman.com.
Accessibility shouldn't be considered an incovnenience - it's just good practice.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
The browser is another story. But Microsoft has had one of the industry's most forward approaches with respect to handicap accessibility since day 1.
I'll give a recent example; in Windows XP, press Windows Key-U. Here we find Narrator, Magnifier, and On Screen Keyboard. Narrator is a very simple screen reader that is able to read dialogs and other alerts aloud. Magnifier is self-descriptive. On-screen keyboard has a fair amount of configurability. If you go to Settings>Typing Mode, it can actually be configured in a "scan and pick" mode much like the input method used by Stephen Hawking, so that a person with limited mobility can type using a single joystick button press, or any sort of "sip and puff" device connected to the gameport.
These are just a few new features, in addition to the obvious ones listed in the Control Panel under Accessibility, and the general configurability of interface which allows people to customize in whatever way is necessary for their disability (change colors for Red-Green color perception issues, link sounds to events, etc)
As far as the whole Standard-Compliance "Endian" battle goes, I would submit that if one looks further than IE 4 (which is only 5 years old, for chrissake) one would find that this is no longer an issue, but for anal-retentive knit-pickers. IE6 has a standards-compliant CSS2 rendering engine, which can be toggled by the HTML author by use of the DOCTYPE directive, as opposed to Nutscrape 6 which completely destroyed rendering of most web-pages by not remaining backwards-compatible.
I would further submit that at present in the "browser market", there is NO single product which "has it all" (If you mention Opera, I have 3 letters for you - DOM). Everyone has a distinct subset of "feature nirvana", and the idea that Microsoft is culpably negligent for failing to hit the moving target of "Full W3C compliance" when nobody else can is just plain old flame-throwing.
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
This is already happening.
The most important visitors your site will have are BLIND. They are the search site robot, and the indexing software. A well-build page with CSS and good structure will be higher in the results than the same information presented on a page with no structural elements and just the "appearance" tags like FONT. I've tested this repeatedly over the years, and it still works.
from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?
Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.
First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.
For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.