Re: Inaccessible Compliant Sites

Just want to make sure to log one of the points Helle made in
passing during the telecon, which I think is very important.

The current evidence (in Europe at least) is that *very very* few
real sites are currently fully meeting even WCAG 1.0 Level A,
never mind Double-A.  This was the substantive conclusion, for
example, from the EU study I was involved with last year:

<http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/eaccessibility/>

And that being the case, it is very difficult to see what
substantive, "real world", evidence that could be that
conformance with WCAG Double-A does *not* substantially improve
accessibility (compared to non-conforming sites)...

And as a further aside: this makes me quite uneasy about the idea
of investing much EO effort to identify "artificial examples" of
how one might comply with WCAG 1.0 but still present substantial
accessibility barriers.  My gut feeling is that, of course,
*some* such artificial examples, or "loopholes", are probably
possible. No guidelines are perfect, after all (not even WCAG 2.0
<wink>).  But to me, they still remain a darned good attempt,
*even* nearly seven years on...  So should we be focussing
attention on the "loopholes" or on the 99% of cases where WCAG
1.0 actually hits the nail on the head?


Best -Barry.

Received on Friday, 28 April 2006 14:53:07 UTC