WCAG 2.0 Comment Submission

Name: Andy Dingley
Email: <andy.dingley@talgentra.com>
Affiliation: 
Document: W2
Item Number: (none selected)
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: GE
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Prompted, I admit, by http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2

I\'m writing to express my disappointment with the WCAG 2.0 draft. The

content is uninspiring and I find the process to be little more than

railroading any public comment. Five years for the draft and a month to

comment? That\'s a rubber-stamp, not an opportunity.



As to the draft itself, then I find it almost worthless. It\'s as

worthless and irrelevant as WCAG 1 was.



I care deeply about web accessibility. As an \"accessibility geek\", I

also find myself in the frustrating position of knowing what to do, but

having repeated management pressure to do just the opposite.

Accessibility still isn\'t a real issue for commercial development and

it\'s leadership from the major bodies that\'s needed most, not developer

education. The information is already out there (Joe Clark, for

starters) and anyone who cares can easily be pointed towards it.



As this draft is though, it presents accessibility as an impossibility

complex matter that\'s about as dry as SGML parsing. There is no way I

can show this WCAG guideline to any sort of manager or commissioning

editor. It falls immediately into deathly dull technical issues couched

in impenetrable language and makes no real case to justify accessibility

as a worthy goal.  Even as a technical description for implementors it\'s

almost worthless.



These have always been the failings of the WCAG guidelines. The 1 -> 2

process though has been little more than an updating and tidying

exercise when the document itself required a ground-up re-write. Or more

usefully, throwing away and simply replacing wuith Joe Clark\'s

well-known boook that does a much better job of all of it!



I\'m disappointed that the W3C has lent its name to this document. As a

counter-example I\'m continually surprised by the quality of the HTML

Recommendation and the subtlety of some design choices I\'m only just

realising the value of, even after using the DTD for years. It\'s a

paragon of _why_ a standards process driven by experts is such a great

thing, when it works.  The WCAG guidelines though are everything that\'s

bad about the output of standards bodies. Obscure, over-complex,

partial, irrelevant, and basically inaccessible.





I would like to see this draft abandoned and the process re-started --

then a new draft developed, from scratch (or possibly lifted wholesale

from the canonical ref I\'ve already mentioned). This is a massive

change, but I see no possibility of turning the existing draft into

anything useful.

Proposed Change:

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2006 06:24:35 UTC