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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!"
Pew! took a while to read it.
No wonder people don't RTFA.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?
sounds good to me...
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I would think the web browser developer community would do good to comply with standards more, sure.. but it's cool to see that standards are being set for a new useful generation of web interactivity (ie: the disabled-access terminals). I'd hope to see more of that sort of technology popping up in society as standards are set for making the web more accessible to people.
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
Now if only there was a standard to make Slashdot articles shorter...
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Some countries (UK, Australia two that I know) have some legislation in place whereby some sites *have* to be designed to meet accessibility guidelines for vision impaired folks.
This really annoyes me. The web is a visual medium. It should not be compulsory to cater for those that can't benefit from a visual medium, in a visual medium.
We don't have legislation to ensure that every book that is released has a braille version and a speaking book version do we? No. Why take on the web this way?
Yes I've been hit by this myself, and it's hugely frustrating being on the end of it as a site developer having the spectre of the law raised above you...
Though this was labeled as troll, and I can see why, I can also see the point in it. Some may not, so I will clarify. Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser is horrid about complying to W3C standards, and even creates its own "standards" that some people are more likely to comply to. Maybe this wouldn't be labeled troll if the statement was more like, "This is a great development for the W3C, but seems that, unfortunately, it's not going to do much good. Microsoft has been making web standards useless ever since they 'took control' of the 'browser market,' and they don't seem to care about accessable web pages (WCAG 1.0, US section 508). I did check the document source for an accessable alternative version as the W3C standards would accept instead of the main version being accessable, but they have no alternative versions, even for mobile devices or anything."
When no one follows it.
Or in some cases, when a standard is so ill-defined as to allow for multiple incompatible interpretations, making it impossible to figure out if you've followed it.
Historically, browsers have consistantly been incompatible, plug-ins have been required to accomplish those things the browsers didn't accomplish, and the goal of content over form has been lost since the <b> tag stuck it's elbow in the <em> tag''s face.
Web site developers, meanwhile, are not only ignorant of the standards, but would be actively encouraged to ignore them by their client even if they knew. The people who build these sites do not care about accessability any more than spammers really care about those people who get mad at the e-mails.
At this point, testing with normal browsers has become impossible, since there are multiple versions of IE, both Mac and PC, on the streets, all of them rendering CSS differently, Mozilla has split yet again, Safari is trying to gain market share, and Opera is still causing web developers to pull their hair out.
And now you want an accessability standard?
I've been a beta tester. I've been a web designer. And I've had an internet account for a decade now. The industry is incapable of following the standards it currently has. It doesn't need new ones. It sure as heck isn't going to follow them. If someone needs an accessabilty guideline, they can use Section 508 for now. It'll do the job until the industry can get it's act together.
No Zen is good zen
The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.
As a Web author, your role is to describe the structure of the content. If you use proper markup, such as H1 for headings and P for paragraphs, then browsers can present your content in an appropriate manner whether it be visual or non-visual.
The Web still consists mostly of text content, and there's nothing visual about that. (Yes, I know about porn, but there's still plenty of text content even there.)
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.
>Once the WCAG 2.0 becomes a recognized standard (probably sometime in 2004), it will most likely be a concern for web developers
Why do you say that?
The HTML standard has been out for years, and it isn't a concern for the average web developer. Why should they start being concerned about accessibility guidelines, when right now they write pages that can only be viewed in Internet Explorer, or only after installing some sort of trojan/spyware on your machine?
Remember when you could type in an address and not see 'Directory Listing Denied'?
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
There are many countries in which accessibility is a legal requirement for lots of organisations. For more information on these, please see WAI Policy.
I believe the most common point of view is that people who must cater to the needs of disabled people in the physical world must also do so on the WWW.
For instance, McDonald's are legally obliged to provide bathrooms that are specially equipped for people with mobility problems, at least in the UK. However private homes aren't required to provide them. It seems reasonable to draw the line at the same place on the web - so individuals would not be required to follow WCAG (or similar), yet service providers would.
This is already happening.
Any site by an organization or company that serves the general public should comply. It's a no-brainer ... why would you deliberately create websites that only some of the visitors can use? How many potential customers do you want to turn away at the door, after spending a lot of effort to get them to the site with search engines and ads ... it might work for a trendy nightclub, but it's a suicidal tactic for a web-based business.
I'f Timmy's Terrific Toe Jam Sculpture site doesn't want to comply, that's Timmy's right. However, Timmy will probably not get much traffic.