question on WCAG 2.0

Dear Group,



reading through the WCAG 2.0 draft I come across this quite early on.



1.      Editorial Note: Feedback from WCAG 1.0 indicates that developers 
often do not attempt to meet any Priority 2 Checkpoints because there is no 
way to indicate in the conformance claim that they have "done more than 
Level A but not enough to claim Level AA." "Core+" is a proposal that 
allows developers to say, "I do more than Core but not all of the 
Extended." However, the WCAG WG has several issues and questions about 
Core+ conformance claims:



The guidelines then goes on to discuss the potential problems with applying 
Core+. However, these seem to be concerned with the issues that may arise 
from the implementation of the Core+ idea.



My main worry here is that WAI is pandering to developers who are acting in 
bad faith. That is, because they cannot claim a certain level then they 
will only do the minimum required to achieve the lower level. This is 
putting themselves before the people theyre supposed to be helping.



The attitude should always be to make a site accessible as possible the 
fact that you cannot quite claim AAis perhaps hard luck on the 
designers/developers but the extra Accessibility will be appreciated by 
site visitors.



Ive helped develop sites that have achieved AAAand even the UK RNIBs See It 
Rightaccreditation and it is great to see the effort officiallyrecognised 
and attributed and visible to the world: so I do understand that. However, 
Ive also produced others sites that could not fulfil all the requirements 
to attain a certain WCAG level e.g. one site that was AAin practise but 
could not officially be claimed to be so because some of the siteHTML was 
not conformant. This did not mean that it would have been acceptable to not 
do as many of the AA guidelines as we did; in the end I know we built a 
website that people will find accessible and that is what matters, not 
having a AAlogo on the homepage.





WCAG must not start accomodating helping people and companies who are just 
ticking the boxes and not actually working to the spirit of the WAI 
initiative .



regards



Maurice Franceschi

Received on Thursday, 8 January 2004 11:11:12 UTC