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Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 finally released!

Published: 12th December 2008

Author: Andrew Hart

Introduction

For those of you not familiar with the W3C's, the WAI and the WCAG here is a brief description:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
is an initiative within the W3C to improve the accessibility (removing barriers to disabled users (also older users - and those with devices such as mobile phones) of the World Wide Web
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
are part of a series of Web accessibility guidelines published by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative

Essentially, the guidelines (WCAG) are the internationally recognised standard for accessibility for websites and form the reference point for the legislation in many countries.

What has changed

The new guidelines are technology-independent, more testable and there are significant movements in the legal world too.

The original guidelines were written very much from a purist point of view. That is to say that all content must be provided in HTML, whilst the style was to be controlled by CSS. The new version embraces more advanced technologies. This allows content providers greater flexibility in the formats they use as the guidelines are format-independent. This change has attracted the greatest amount of criticism as it has led to some extraordinarily complex language being used in the guidelines. The interpretation and subsequent application of these guidelines may well suffer as a result of such complexity.

The new version is also intended to be far more precisely testable. Any vagueness from the initial version have been revised to include details of how to test for them, and the parameters within which the results should fall. For example, if the original called for "sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours" the new version provides an equation for determining the contrast level and sets the limits within which the results must lie.

There has also been movement in the legal aspects surrounding accessibility. In the recently passed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, access to information and communications technologies is for the first time recognized internationally as a human right, according to George Kerscher, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium. WCAG 2.0 will help to make access to information a reality around the world.

At Simius Web we have been following the development of the WCAG 2.0, and are in the process of updating a number of websites accordingly, including our own. We will publish some real-life experiences of working with the new standards shortly.

Further reading

This list contains links to material from official sources within the W3C's WAI and also to articles written by independent industry experts. Whilst Simius Web supports the WCAG 2.0 we have included arguments from those that oppose them. We want our readers to be aware of both sides of the argument.

W3C references

Other references and views on the WCAG 2.0

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