RE: Unifying ATAG and UAAG in 4.2 (or surrogate)

Joe Clark wrote:

> So. From the call today (yes, hell froze over and I was on 
> the call), I mentioned that ATAG and UAAG are the forgotten 
> children of Web accessibility. A lot of noncompliant Web 
> sites are noncompliant out of ignorance; their owners don't 
> even know that ATAG and UAAG exist. 
> But everyone knows WCAG exists.
> 

Actually, that last statement might be more true in the United States than
it is in some other parts of the world including the Netherlands where I
live. Website owners here have hardly even heard of the problem of web
accessibility, let alone that they know international guidelines exist to
help them. Here in the Netherlands we've had an initiative to raise
awareness, but that was aimed at public organizations like government
branches, banks, hospitals, etc. The average corporate website owner in the
Netherlands think blind people can't use the internet because they can't
view the monitor :-(

In fact, I think a larger portion of Dutch user agent builders knows about
UAAG than web developers know about WCAG. Of course, there probably aren't
that many user agent builders in the Netherlands, so if one knows UAAG
exists you already have a high percentage :-)

I do like your proposal that WCAG should reference UAAG and ATAG, just like
UAAG and ATAG reference WCAG. That way we maximize the awareness of the
existence of these guidelines.

Yvette Hoitink
Heritas, Enschede, The Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl
WWW: http://www.heritas.nl

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 22:26:52 UTC