Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Now Final

beetle496 writes "It has been going on nine years now, but finally there are formal standards for Web accessibility for technologies other than HTML. They ask that you start with the press release (lots of links), but regulars might be more entertained by the last time WCAG made the front page here. Many folks here will point out that web accessibility is old hat, and by implication this is hardly news, but if you do Web development for any government organization, you should expect that accessibility is a base requirement. The Section 508 standards are to be updated (relatively) soon too."

Comments

Nine years?

[Jeff Hornby]

Nine years? Nine YEARS? Are you kidding me?

Is it any wonder that so much software is not standards compliant. I mean seriously, if standards bodies really want to be taken seriously outside of academia, they really need to start working more than a few minutes a month. Have these people thought about adopting this standard: the forty hour work week.

i wonder...

[pwolf]

Now that this has been released, i wonder when the first lawsuit will be filed against [insert random government agency] for not having a W3C Web Accessibility Standard wesbite. Little Timmy can't read the website using his text to speech :(

Re:Wouldn't it be easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to show your support for this initiative, mod this comment down.

My pleasure, you fucking idiot. I have a better idea:
Wouldn't it be easier just to kill all the idiots?
1. No more trolling
2. No more time wasted with them. Idiots are idiots and time is extremely valuable to the civilization in general. Let's save more time by killing all the idiots so we can spend it in a more productive manner than explaining to them that they're fucktards.
3. It would mean an explosion of technologies and knowledge that would ease everyone's life. These shit-for-brains just drag us down by doing nothing productive, as they just bitch about everything without taking a second to think before opening their mouths.
4. It would get rid of all the idiots

Oviously, there are no exceptions.

If you would like to show your support for this initiative, mod this comment up.

Aaahhhhhhhhh... trolling feels sooo goood!

Re:Solutions in search of a problem?

[Shados]

long before all this well-intentioned madness starts to limit the amount of good material that is published?

It already does. Some companies that are bound by these standards or regulation (since in certain case, it is enforced by law) have been slapped on the wrists (or more) for publishing things without following all accessibility rules, and the result sometimes has been to simply not publish them at all, because it ended up being too much worse (let say, for a professor who wanted to publish some extra info cuz he had it on hand, but would have had to make it "accessible", which would have taken time he simply did not have).

So yes, it already happens, a lot. Its an awkward situation, because people lose out no matter what you to... Don't have any standards and regulations, and no one will give a shit about people with disabilities... Have them enforced, and people simply will not publish things that are covered under the standard.

The best solution is to improve the tooling, and give insensive for the people that makes tools to enhance the experience for those with disabilities to make even more tools. If there's something semi-reliable to make a captioning of any podcast in real time, well, it won't be perfect, but better than nothing no? Stuff like that.

Reading Level

[nuigi]

I disagree that the reading level of sites should be brought down to a 9th grade reading level [w3.org]. A reading level rating would be more appropriate. Most of the internet, slashdot included, will not have a problem with that; the web content worth reading, slashdot included, are well above that.

According to the linked page, "popular software" can determine the reading level of text in multiple languages. A quick Google search revealed a PHP project php-text-statistics; it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between highly moderated comments and some of the reading comprehension metrics.

WCAG is only for people without disabilities

[oneiros27]

Or at least, the writing of the standards were. From Joe Clark's comments from early 2006:

The process stinks
And now a word about process, which you have have to appreciate in order to understand the result. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I've ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.

The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't speak English. More importantly, it's inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability (who must wade through ill-written standards documents and e-mails--there's already been a complaint) and anyone who's deaf (who must listen to conference calls). Almost nobody with a learning disability or hearing impairment contributes to the process--because, in practical terms, they can't.

What WAI is supposed to be doing is improving the web for people with disabilities. Something's wrong if many participants work in a climate of fear, as they tell me they do. I never hear of similar complaints from WAI's other groups. WCAG Working Group is a rogue element within the W3C, one that chair Tim Berners-Lee must urgently bring to heel.

The process is broken, so let's not be surprised that the result of that process is broken, too.