Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Now Final

Posted by kdawson on from the standards-grind-slow dept.

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."

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Nine years? by Jeff+Hornby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
  2. Reading Level by nuigi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.