Re: Role of WCAG guidance (was a CFC response)

Hi everyone,

I think Andrew & John made good points about the scope of WCAG, I wanted to follow up on:
> Making it a requirement to modify default focus indicators all but guarantees that non-technically inclined, small-to-medium website owners around the globe will be put at regulatory or legal risk of non-conformance for something they didn’t or can’t change with their tools.

I work with small/medium orgs fairly regularly, and small parts of larger orgs who have under a £5/10k budget for their entire website. I think this misunderstands the choices available.

If the people making the website don’t have the knowledge / skills for editing CSS, themes, or template, it is a procurement problem (or tool-choice if free) rather than a remediation problem. At this level you’d focus on selecting tools/hosting & gathering content.

Wordpress apparently runs about 27% of the websites out there, so you’d look to their accessible themes:
https://wordpress.com/themes/filter/accessibility-ready
Wix equivalent: https://www.wix.com/accessibility/templates

Providers like Shopify require themes to be accessible for their shop:
https://www.shopify.co.uk/partners/blog/theme-store-accessibility-requirements

It would be rare for site-owners at this level to adjust focus-styles, or the label on a search form (or a host of other criteria). But they could favour accessible tools, and that is the relevant choice for them.

Lack of knowledge is no excuse for platform/tool providers, they are in a position to know and to implement accessible interfaces.

After that, it is in the hands of regulators / laws and market dynamics, i.e. choosing tools that meet the regs / law, or meet your accessibility goals.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

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@alastc / www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com>