- From: Matt May <mcmay@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:00:22 -0700
- To: "Bailey, Bruce" <Bruce.Bailey@ed.gov>
- Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Bailey, Bruce wrote: >Understood, but I cannot think of any single item that would have more far reaching impact than raising validity to the P1 level. > > For accessibility? How do you figure? I'd go with "Provide text alternatives for non-text content" myself. >>Invalid code is highly correlated with inaccessible HTML >> >> > >Five years later it is still apparently impossible to find a non-trivial formally valid site that isn't WCAG1 Single A conformant. Does anyone care to argue that, in actual practice, the one-way correlation between validity and accessibility is less than 99.9%? > > Yes. The notion is absurd. I've seen some of the best designers out there make the statement that validity equals accessibility, and each time, they've taken heat for it _from their own community_. It's not the product that makes valid code also accessible, it's the _practice_. Accessibility is not a subset of validity, just a related property. My cat has stripes, but that doesn't make him a tiger. Both accessibility and validity are indicators of higher-order proficiency on the part of the developer. Now, I could easily find you highly accessible invalid documents, and completely accessible documents, but it would get boring quickly. Maybe I should start with the Department of Education homepage? The DRC report from late last year said that 81% of their sample of UK sites failed WCAG 1.0 level A. They can't all be invalid. And I think that if you dig through the data, you'll find that what I said originally is true: valid sites are generally more accessible, but validity does not cause accessibility by any stretch. >Allow me to be US-centric for a moment. WCAG1 P1 strongly influenced the Section 508 Accessibility Standards. The 508 Standards are well overdue for updating. It stands to reason that WCAG2 P1 will strongly influence any revision to the 508 Standards. Taking the safe^D^D^D^D cowardly route for the guidelines is likely to doom the government requirements which will follow to a similar level of mediocrity. > > I think that the US government itself has enough trouble keeping documents valid that a validity requirement would be the first thing taken out. - m
Received on Wednesday, 15 June 2005 16:00:25 UTC