Pat’s Point of View

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about accessibility, probably because I haven’t had much time—too busy with all this consulting and mentoring stuff!

But there have been some recent developments that are worth a mention. For many years there has been fierce debate over the next version of the guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and exactly what they should be. More recently this debate has come to a head in the form of open revolt against the W3C and its plan for WCAG 2.0. A the heart of this was a group of passionate experts (who became known as the ‘WCAG Samurai’) who decided to do something about the situation.

Well the Samurai have just released a draft of their work which they call WCAG 1.0 errata. They are ignoring WCAG 2.0 in whatever state it is currently in and are offering an alternative set of guidelines (a revised version of WCAG 1.0).

As someone who has experience attempting to create accessible websites (and taken a look at WCAG 2.0) I would thoroughly recommend adopting WCAG+Samuari as a practical and effective set of guidelines. All of the politics and squabbling aside, it is quite a relief that some progress is being made towards giving site developers and owners something useful, and definitive, to rely on as they try to do the right thing.

[Thanks to Russ for the tip off.]

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