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W3C Web Accessibility Standards 2.0

Posted by michael on Sat Aug 02, 2003 07:23 AM
from the bifocals dept.
The Internet
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!"
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[+] Technology: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Now Final 57 comments
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."
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  • Pew! (Score:5, Funny)

    by thorgil (455385) on Saturday August 02 2003, @07:31AM (#6595029) Homepage
    Pew! took a while to read it.
    No wonder people don't RTFA.

    • Re:Pew! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RobotWisdom (25776) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:10AM (#6595087) Homepage
      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)

      • 2. written in an over-abstract, PhD-thesis prose-style

        Perhaps, then, somebody should write the "In Plain English" or "Clearly Explained" version?

        • Re:Pew! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by RobotWisdom (25776) on Saturday August 02 2003, @10:04AM (#6595384) Homepage
          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] [robotwisdom.com]

          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 [robotwisdom.com] 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by acehole (174372) on Saturday August 02 2003, @07:33AM (#6595030) Homepage
    How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?

    sounds good to me...

    • Re:Hrmm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tirel (692085)
      how about you using a browser that doesn't allow popups (opera, all mozilla derivates, konqueror, all text browsers and dillo are just a few that come to mind), or if you really need to stick to the current browser, why not just use a proxy that blocks them (squid, junkbusters, proximitron, tinyproxy,... the list goes on) ?

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

      I haven't had a problem with them since I stopped using IE. :) Maybe we should put forward a recommendation that everyone who uses it switch to Mozilla, Opera, etc.?

    • Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by xenotrout (680453) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:03AM (#6595073) Homepage Journal
      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 [watchfire.com] and you'll see. Even slashdot has quite a few "violations" of the WCAG 1.0 standard.
        • I do a lot of web development, and I hate IE with a passion. Ideally, I use Safari, and when I'm not on OS X I use Mozilla (or other Gecko based browsers).

          The problem is that 95%+ of traffic that web sites see is IE. Realistically, when 95% of your traffic is one browser, you make sure things work in that browser first and worry about the other guys later, when time and budget permit. It sucks, but that's the way things are, and since AOL was bought off I don't see things getting any better.

  • Here's a useful tool (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Saturday August 02 2003, @07:57AM (#6595063)
    If you want to test if your webpage is accessible to visually deficient people, you can ask Bobby [watchfire.com] 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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by JimDabell (42870) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:25AM (#6595120) Homepage

      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 [webthing.com] does a very good job, much better than Bobby used to (I haven't tried Bobby in a while though).

    • Contrary to the parent, Bobby is the least useful accessibility report tool in town.

      I work in an office that does accessibility reviews, and we have never used Bobby. It was bought out by a for-profit (after belonging to a NFP group for quite some time) and has more or less stagnated.

      Bobby will give you an enormous list of things to fix, but most of what it says can be ignored and it ignores most of what needs to be said.

      At the moment, our office doesn't recommend any automated accessibility checker. LIF
  • Now if only there was a standard to make Slashdot articles shorter...

  • Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrd_yaddayadda (629895) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:06AM (#6595079)
    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. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quinine (20902) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:10AM (#6595086) Homepage
      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. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by finitimi (126732) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:36AM (#6595147)
        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.
    • 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.
      I've worked with blind people : there's a lot of simple services and entertainments that aren't accessible to them simply because selfish brats like you say "to hell with them, this or that isn't designed for them so why should we go out of our way to allow them to access it.".

      Guess what: blind people go to art museums to touch sculptures, they go

    • Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iangoldby (552781) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:35AM (#6595142) Homepage
      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?

    • The Web is not a visual medium (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LiamQ (110676) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:45AM (#6595172)

      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.)

      • 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.

        Goldfarb's Conjecture has been repeated so often and so mindlessly that everyone's forgotten it's a hypothesis about human cognition that's never actually been tested. Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, a

        • Re:The Web is not a visual medium (Score:4, Insightful)

          by LiamQ (110676) on Saturday August 02 2003, @09:34AM (#6595294)

          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.

          • Tagging a phone number would be extremely useful

            Certainly, I'm all in favor of semantic markup, but Goldfarb's Conjecture that styles should naturally be layered on top of these semantics is just deluded, imho. (The best approach to semantic markup would even be visible to screen scrapers, I think.)

        • HTML 2.0 and the Strict variant HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 (which have the same vocabulary of elements) are not so far apart. It's the crud that got inserted in between (FONT, color and align attributes) that we're better off without, now that CSS support is quite decent in 95% of the browsers used. CSS makes webdesign easier, especially when you don't have to think about Netscape 4 compatability.

          Separation of structure and style not only makes your work easier. It will also make a difference for blind users when
          • Separation of structure and style not only makes your work easier.

            There's no reason to burden the published page with authoring hints.

            It will also make a difference for blind users when tool builders can actually count on it.

            I think this oft-repeated claim is a hoax.

            • The most important visitors your site will have are BLIND. They are the search site robot, and the indexing software. A well-build page with CSS and good structure will be higher in the results than the same information presented on a page with no structural elements and just the "appearance" tags like FONT. I've tested this repeatedly over the years, and it still works.

        • I'm not familiar with Goldfarb's conjecture, but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately. Unless you are arguing that the same presentation is always suitable for everyone, or that you can easily convert one presentation into another, I don't see what your point is.

          Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I,

          All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.

          or from P instead

        • 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.

          Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

          The designed-for purpose of the Web wasn't visual at all. That's clear fr

        • 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.

          Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

          Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, incl

    • From your comments, you seem to be suffering from the same misconception as whoever posted the article. Web accesibility is not in its infancy, it was strangled whilst learning to walk during Browser Wars, by a couple of greedy companies and a load of graphic designers, most of whom appear(ed) to know nothing about traditional publishing, let alone machine markup. What is happening now is Web Accessibility Reloaded.

      If we want an Internet page description language, various options exist, including the newis

    • Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok. (Score:5, Informative)

      by NulDevice (186369) on Saturday August 02 2003, @10:30AM (#6595455) Homepage
      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.

  • When is a standard not a standard? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bons (119581) on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:30AM (#6595131) Homepage Journal
    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 [section508.gov] for now. It'll do the job until the industry can get it's act together.

    • 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?

      "Accessible" also means accessible for people with different browsers. If you follow the WAI guidelines, your site will work OK in all of them, not only

  • To me it looks like my site does okay.

    One interesting thing I found with a few seconds fumbling was the use of

    on this page
    http://bobby.cast.org/bobby/html/en/gls/g10 9 .html

    recently I was reading XHTML stuff and noticed that if you want to be forward thinking any new stuff you create would be better off chosing as xhtml requires it.

    and I thought back to all the times I've had to write special case code to deal with "checked", if only I'd known.

    The tips I have read mostly, for me anyway, deal with filli
  • Trouble is, as long as the mainstream webpage building programs (Frontpage, Dreamweaver, ...) don't catch up, web is going to be a horrid place for non-visual media.

    Usually artists who design the visual part of a web page don't want to spawn Vim - they use these graphical tools which rarely comply even to HTML4/tagsoup. Table layouts are so commonplace even today and these documents make no sense structurally.

    And a lot of artists prefer using Shockwave/Flash to build pages: they get more control. That w
  • I've been hearing about accessibility and other potentially imposing guidelines for quite some time, and I've always been curious: is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines? Or are they intended to be recommended standards to be followed throughout a more libertarian kind of world wide web?

    The reason I ask is that I can certainly understand why official government and commercial web sites might need to be held to rather strict standards -- the freedom of speech does not apply to them nearly to th

    • I've been hearing about accessibility and other potentially imposing guidelines for quite some time, and I've always been curious: is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines?

      There are many countries in which accessibility is a legal requirement for lots of organisations. For more information on these, please see WAI Policy [w3.org].

      But speaking of the private individual, should you and I also be subject to enforcement of web guidelines even in our personal, private web space?

      I believe the mo

    • "is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines"

      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

  • Sheesh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >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
  • is practice as well as in design. Then its becomes a lot easier to farm out presentation and trigger interaction to switchable leaves on the presentation layer (like switching data base engines leavel on the persistence layer.)

    It may be infrastructure and belongs "behind the GypRock" but yhou still have to deal with it in a coherent fashion.

    • Re:the internet community (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cmang (103268) on Saturday August 02 2003, @07:36AM (#6595039)
      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.

    • Re:the internet community (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anime_Fan (636798) <slashdot@sj o e l u n d . net> on Saturday August 02 2003, @08:00AM (#6595066) Homepage
      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
    • 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 ev
      • 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 co

    • Bandwidth and W3C Recommendations (Score:5, Informative)

      by LiamQ (110676) on Saturday August 02 2003, @09:22AM (#6595254)

      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.

    • All that should be a concern is using valid HTML

      That's certainly an excellent start (though valid XHTML would be far preferable), but not by any means a full solution. If I post an image that contains relevant information (a graph, say), all I need to provide is a simple ALT tag ("Usage graph for 2002"), and a HTML validator will let it pass. But that tag is of no use to someone who can't see it, but needs the information in conveys. That's why we need more comprehensive standards to ensure that, as the

    • Not to mention how absurd it is to assume that developers know about or understand the special needs of people. We are devlopers, not therapists or doctors.

      What do you think the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are for?

      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%.

      Please back that up. The trend is towards less bandwidth usage, not more. Take a look at the recent redesigns by many high-profile

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