Pat’s Point of View

A few Friday’s ago (7th April) I attended a mini seminar organised by The Web Standards Group (WSG), on the subject of WCAG 2.0 the next version of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

These guidelines are the bread and butter of accessibility. Version 1 was published in 1998 and so we have all been waiting anxiously in the last few years for a new version that hopefully addresses some of the many issues that practitioners have come across when using the guidelines “in the trenches”.

But sadly we’re still waiting and there have been many stories going around about the disastrous time the W3C is having in trying to deliver WCAG 2.0, and what I heard on Friday is no more promising. It appears that the corporates (who shall not be named) have hijacked the working group and steered it towards creating a set of guidelines that are even more confusing than WCAG 1.0 and even less strict.

Besides being incomprehensible by normal human beings (and thus impossible to implement, test, police) they have been watered down. True, version 1 had it’s faults (including being biased towards visual disabilities) but in an effort to fix this and in conjunction with the whole corporate hijacking, version 2 is much worse.

I think unless we take action and force the W3C to re-think WCAG 2.0, the already frustrating state of affairs in the accessibility field will get rapidly worse and potentially we’ll be left without anything to guide us in developing accessible websites and intranets.

The second speaker of the night was Bruce McGuire, from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEREOC). Bruce has found a modicum of fame as the plaintiff in the first (and one of very few) legal battles over accessibility, when in 2000 he sued IBM over the badly constructed Sydney Olympics website. It’s almost always the cited case when people try to build an argument for the legal responsibility behind accessibility. Besides being quite an entertaining speaker, Bruce also gave us some good insight into the official view of the Australian government and legal system. He hinted that because of the troubles with WCAG 2.0, HEREOC and other policy making bodies around the world, may end up diverging from the W3C’s guidelines and making their own recommendations on how we should approach accessibility.

Although this will undoubtedly be rather messy, I was glad to hear there are sensible people saying sensible things in our government. Rather than tasking the easy way out, and simply following the whatever the W3C outputs, they may actually put the needs of the community first and try to rectify the situation.

A podcast of the seminar can be found on the WSG website.

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