Re: Outlet for Authors to override guidelines

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 12:00 AM, Jens Meiert wrote:

>
>> Not to be trite, but it appears to me that if an author wants to 
>> invoke
>> personal preference that they simply not conform to WCAG. To be even
>> more trite, the author may state "This site does not conform to WCAG
>> because the author feels artistic freedom is more important than
>> accessibility."
>
> That sounds that blanket -- when creating Web sites, I observe several
> things to be arranged. On the one hand, I want to create valid markup, 
> on the
> other hand, I want to create accessible and usable pages, and I want 
> to create
> pages usable in almost all browsers.

The question is whether or not the guidelines provide a normative
conformance scheme (as WCAG 1.0 does) or if they provide specific
sample conformance schemes (which can be structured to parallel
WCAG 1.0 A/AA/AAA if desired) as examples of using WCAG 2.0 as a
toolkit for building accessibility policies.

I have long advocated the latter approach.  The process of developing
an accessibility policy is very different from the process of creating
an accessible Web site.  WCAG 2.0 should be a toolkit for doing so,
in a way that is interoperable and standardized, to prevent situations
like the case of Section 508.  (In other words, you should be able to
"build" a policy approximating 508 by selecting portions of WCAG 2.0.
This will likely be much different from the "default" conformance
schemes.)

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
Shock & Awe Blog                           http://blog.kynn.com/shock

Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2003 01:16:15 UTC