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!"

Comments

Pew!

[thorgil]

Pew! took a while to read it.
No wonder people don't RTFA.

Re:Pew!

[RobotWisdom]

Like all W3C proclamations, this has three deadly accessibility problems:

1. 20+ screens of meta-information before the real content starts
2. written in an over-abstract, PhD-thesis prose-style
3. readability is decreased by highlighting many phrases as inline anchortext (better to isolate the links at the end of the sentence or paragraph, imho)

Re:Pew!

[RobotWisdom]

Basically, separating the link from what it refers to is incredibly bad. It makes it harder to work out what it's referring to.

My theory is that there's three important dimensions in labelling a link: first the topic, then the resource-type (etext, image, etc), and last the rating (good or bad).

Topic usually doesn't change within a sentence, so I like to add a 'text button' at the end that augments the topic-info with the resource-type. [examples]

I usually skip the rating unless it's especialy good or bad.

If you're referring to an organisation or source of information, it's very useful only helpful to put it there.

The problem is, you can't specify the resource type-- if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page? For an organisation, you can guess it will be their official website, but this is not reliable. (I make an exception when the sentence mentions the resource type, like "There's a great weblog I stumbled upon...")

If you find any inline links to be too intrusive, just set your user agent

They reduce readability for everyone, even if the color is tweaked, so the author should look for a better way....imho.

Hrmm

[acehole]

How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?

sounds good to me...

Re:Hrmm

[xenotrout]

Removal of pop-ups is a recommendation of the current w3c accessability standards. Switching window focus without letting the user know that it is going to happen can confuse accessibility programs and users. I believe pop-unders are just a hack that switches focus back, so they are also not recommended.
Very few web sites that I've seen care about accessibility standards. Very few web devs, it seems, even care about W3C standards, because they develop for browsers (i.e. IE) rather than for the web (i.e. W3C standards). Check a number of pages with Watchfire Bobby and you'll see. Even slashdot has quite a few "violations" of the WCAG 1.0 standard.

Re:the internet community

[cmang]

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.

Here's a useful tool

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Here's a useful tool

[JimDabell]

Of course, automated tools cannot accurately test for compliance with WCAG, Section 508, or similar accessibility requirements, merely check a few things and give pointers to the bits it cannot check.

I've found that the Accessibility Valet does a very good job, much better than Bobby used to (I haven't tried Bobby in a while though).

Re:the internet community

[Anime_Fan]

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

Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[mrd_yaddayadda]

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...

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[quinine]

Well, if you're talking about sites that provide govenment services then yes, accessability standards should be maintained. Just like if you go to a courthouse, there needs to be a ramp there for wheelchairs. If your talking about rubmyhotbutt.com, though, then I agree with you; this should not be compulsory.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[iangoldby]

I think you are missing the point that the web so easily could be an ideal medium for non-visual information.

For example, if you compare the technology required to read a paper book out loud to that required to read an electronic text file out aloud, I'm sure you will see that the latter is a far easier task. There's no reason to make it difficult, but designers do, just because they think it is more important to have a heading in their own choice of font (presented as a bitmap) than for a minority to be able to read it.

You might also like to bear in mind that local government in the UK has a duty to make information available in a form that people can understand. That's why most leaflets tell you where to get hold of a large-print version, or in audio tape form. (Presumably your neighbour tells you this from the original leaflet if you can't read it yourself!)

So I ask again: The web is ideally suited to avoid the effort required to make paper documents universally accessible. Why make it difficult?

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[finitimi]

Accessibility benefits everyone, not just the disabled. I recall back when wheelchair accesibility was first made a requirement for public places. I remember thinking to myself, "we have to spend all this money just for a few cripples?" Since then, I've raised a few children who I pushed around in strollers, and I was mighty glad for simple accessibility features such as sloping curb cuts in sidewalks.

The w3c guidelines are mostly common-sense hints about what not to do. Many barriers to access are unintentional; the w3c is doing web developers a service by pointing them out.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

In the US, it's Section508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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 .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.

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.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

And therein lies my whole problem with this. Accessibility compliant pages are damn ugly. Almost uniformly.

That's not true at all.

And so what we end up doing is take a visual medium and break it for those with different needs.

Accessible websites don't have to be ugly. What makes you think that they do?

When is a standard not a standard?

[bons]

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.

The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

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.

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.)

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

Tagging a phone number would be extremely useful for the many new smartphones and phone/PDA combos that include a Web browser. Then those browsers could allow you to easily call the number, send an SMS/MMS, or add the number to your address book.

Bandwidth and W3C Recommendations

[LiamQ]

The W3C should also consider the cost of bandwidth. By fully compling with their recs, each html page will increase in size from 25 to 50%.

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.