Action item: Accessibility and conformance section

(At the face-to-face in Venice, I took an action item to write some 
introductory text for WCAG 2 describing the relationship between 
accessibility and conformance. Here is my first draft for the WG to 
discuss.)


Accessibility and Conformance

Some of these checkpoints are easy to test and implement. Others are 
necessarily more vague, because they suggest an improvement to a 
process rather than technical changes to a block of code. It is 
important to understand what problems these guidelines are intended to 
solve, and design content that best suits those needs.

Web accessibility is a process, not a quantifiable fact. Accessible 
design requires not just rules for developers and quality-assurance 
teams, but some degree of understanding among all those involved in the 
creation of a site, including usability teams, graphic designers and 
content authors. Each person involved in the creation of Web content 
has a role in making it more accessible. The Web Content Accessibility 
Guidelines should be used as a reference for implementing that process 
in the creation of Web content.

Accessibility evaluation tools are common and readily available, and 
they are useful components in an accessible design process. Many of 
them rate a page, and offer their judgment about whether the page 
conforms to WCAG. However, relying on evaluation tools alone to 
indicate the accessibility of a site, or worse, designing only to 
satisfy them, is not an ideal process. The Guidelines are meant to be 
understood and integrated into an organization's workflow, as they help 
authors to work around accessibility problems when taken as a whole.

Using an evaluation tool alone only guarantees that the most testable 
criteria have been satisfied. Often, very important elements are left 
out of sites that claim to pass an evaluation tool because authors 
didn't understand, or ignored, checkpoints that were too hard for tools 
to test. This leaves many users without the accessibility features they 
need, and many more encumbered by the sloppy efforts of the author to 
silence the tool's error messages.

The most reliable way to ensure that Web content is designed accessibly 
is to learn, understand, and incorporate these Guidelines in the 
creation of all Web content. A good grasp of the Web Content 
Accessibility Guidelines will reduce the development time on Web 
projects by solving accessibility problems up front. It will also 
lessen the dependence on evaluation tools. But most importantly, an 
organization that standardizes on accessible design can be sure that 
their sites can be used successfully by people both with and without 
disabilities.

-
m

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2003 00:58:00 UTC