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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
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."