WCAG 2.0, a joke or for real?

Am I the only one flabbergasted by the Working Draft of Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines 2.0?

I have a very strong feeling that WCAG 2.0 is moving in a wrong
direction making it impossible to understand, use, defend and promote.

WCAG 1.0 was also problematic, but at least it was somehow concrete
calling a spade a spade most of the time.

In WCAG 2.0 concrete issues like the inaccessibility of most pdf-files,
etc., is not an issue any more. The issue could be indirectly present
somewhere but not easy to find, I have been looking for half a day now.

Instead the new focus is on grammar and how to spell words (Level 3
Success Criteria for Guideline 2.5). Even a local search engine should
have a spell checker and one day probably even a grammar checker. Could
be nice, even important, but should at least not be the main focus of
accessibility today.

And what about this one:

(Level 3 Success Criteria for Guideline 3.1): "Where a word has multiple
meanings and the intended meaning is not the first in the associated
dictionary(s), then additional markup or another mechanism is provided
for determining the correct meaning."
 
If WCAG 2.0 is not turning back to a more common sense direction putting
more focus at the important issues on the web at the moment, I fear a
schism in the accessibility movement.

WCAG could very well end up like some stupid "governmental" policy, we
need to ignore, oppose or ridicule most of the time like American
Foreign Policy.
 
Many of us will probably have to join hands in a more down to earth way
of fighting for a more universal, usable and accessible World Wide Web
from the point of view of users and web page authors.

I have not sent my comments yet but we should all do that in order to
attempt to save WCAG from itself.

Best regards,
Jesper Tverskov

www.smackthemouse.com

Received on Friday, 13 August 2004 11:57:54 UTC