A Look at the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines for Accessibility

When the team asked me to write a post for the Chalkboard blog this week, we kicked around some ideas regarding what I should write about. We threw out such riveting topics such as “If Captain Kirk was a Mac, and Captain Picard was a PC, who would really win in a laser-gun fight?” and “at what point do you go deaf when reading internet posts written in capital letter?” (Though, I think we’re going to save this gem for a later date.) When we started talking about web accessibility, my mind immediately went to the announcement that the W3C had recently published the first update to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in almost 10 years, bringing it up to version 2.0. Only Guns & Roses took longer to issue a new release. (The argument could be made, of course, that Guns is not really Guns without Slash, but I digress.)

To give you a better idea of how far we’ve come since that time, here are just a few things that happened in 1999:

• The Dow Jones closed about 10,000 for the first time, giving us hope for the future of our economy.
• Microsoft released Windows 98 Second Edition to it’s adoring public, spelling the end of that whole Apple-craze thing.
• The first Star Wars prequel was released and millions of nerds dressed up like Darth Vader and Bigfoots (or is it Bigfeet?) descended upon theaters nationwide (no! I was not one of them… I was Boba Fett, thank you.)
• Apple releases the first iBook to mass skepticism, it’s critics claiming the “i”nomenclature was idiotic and would never stick.
• The Dow Jones closed above 11,000 for the first time, giving us hope for the future of our economy.
• A little known governor from Texas announces he would be riding his father’s coattails to the White House running for president in order to maintain our robust economy.

Anyway, it’s probably fairly apparent that these guidelines are due an upgrade, but what exactly are they, and why should you care?

Essentially, the WCAG is a document, or, rather, a collection of recommendations that spell out (in excruciatingly painful detail, I might add) the steps that I, as a web author, must take in order to create web documents (i.e. “pages”) that are available and accessible to everyone, regardless of disability or impairment. Or, according to the governing body of web standards, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the WCAG provides a checklist for developers to “make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these.” (1)

If I lost you at some point in that last little sentence there, consider yourself among friends. The fact that the WCAG reads more like a legal document may be an underlying reason why truly accessible web is so far away from being a reality.

Several people have already written about the WCAG 2.0, including Joe Clark’s early look at them in his article “To Hell With WCAG 2.0”. It would be quite pretentious for me to rehash all the material available for light bathroom reading by following the above links, so I’ll just say that I agree with everything that’s been written thus far. Although this sounds a bit like answering “yes” to the very important question of whether I want catsup or mustard on my hot dog, it speaks to the fact that current set of guidelines have been so out of date for so long that any type of improvement is welcomed, regardless of whether the improvements are justified, or even meaningful. Does this mean I don’t believe in accessibility? Whoa, there partner –

 didn’t say that. I don’t, however, believe that strongly in the WCAG simply because by releasing an upgrade to a 10-year old document does not an accessible web make, nor does the publication of a new standard cause all web authors to immediately adopt them as gospel. The proof in the puddin’ is with the publication of the XHTML standard in 2000. I won’t bore you with details, but there are hundreds of examples of large companies whose web sites are littered with poorly written, inaccessible code. Thus my point: it’s not up to the W3C to make the web a more accessible or standards-compliant place; it is up to the web author. Just as a good chef must take pride in what he or she is cooking as well as have intimate knowledge of each and every ingredient that goes into their dish in order for the consumer to have a good culinary experience, the web author must truly understand and be passionate about every line of code that makes up a page in order for the end-user to have an enjoyable web experience.

So is the WCAG important, or not?

Sure it is. Web accessibility is at the top of the list of areas that must be improved upon in the coming years. In that regard, the WCAG is a great step forward, but it’s not the solution. Those of us who have been practicing accessible coding methods have been, for the most part, implementing the guidelines spelled out in version 2.0 for some time, but, again, the release of a new standard will, unfortunately, not make the web an immediately accessible place.

Here at {e}, I’m committed to making sure all our projects come out of the oven as accessible as possible, while still maintaining the visual excellence and superb user experience that Bob, Aaron and the rest of the team have worked so hard to provide. I’m proud to be with working with a group of people that take as much pride and have the same amount of passion for their work as I do. It’s also really exciting to be able to let free my inner geek… alright, alright, maybe it’s not that inner.

Sam King,
Senior {e} Developer

⁽¹⁾ http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-WCAG20-20081103/