RE: US Sec. 508

We didn't do too badly.

From about halfway down URL
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/nprm.htm

<blockquote>
The advisory committee recommended that the Board's standards reference the
World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) (13)
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines,
and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, including requirements from
priority levels one and two for each document.

Rather than referencing the WAI guidelines, the proposed standards include
provisions which are based generally on priority level one checkpoints of
the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, as well as other agency
documents on web accessibility and additional recommendations of the
advisory committee. The Board's rephrasing of language from the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 in paragraph (c) of the proposed rule has not
been reviewed by the W3C, since proposed rules are not made public until
published in the Federal Register.
</blockquote>

It is nearly impossible to prevent entrenched bureaucracies from re-writing
something that someone else has composed perfectly well.  This tendency,
coupled with the fact that the Access Board is addressing accessibility
issues for diverse systems (of which web content is only a small part) means
that it is hardly surprising that they wouldn't just reference the WCAG.
IMHO, the reasonably prominent and explicit reference to the WCAG is nothing
short of a victory.  Given the practical implementation problems with many
of the P2 checkpoints (which I have carped on before) it is quite reasonable
that they would focus on the P1 items instead.

--
Cheers,
Bruce Bailey


> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Gregg Vanderheiden
> Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 5:13 PM
> To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
> Subject: RE: US Sec. 508 [was: Re: FW: ADA/ABA Accessibility Guidelines
> Notice of Proposed Rulemakin g]
>
>
> The new 508 guidelines are out and they chose not to use the WCAG.   We
> should talk about what the implications of this are.  There will
> now be two
> different sets of guidelines for what constitutes accessible web sites or
> pages.
>
> We should take a close look at the similarities and differences between
> them.
> We should also see if there is anything that should be added or removed or
> reworded in the 508 regs and get those in as comments.
>
> Should be interesting.
>
> Gregg

Received on Monday, 3 April 2000 10:31:01 UTC