Re: Exclusion of Visual Readers with Low Vision form WCAG 2.0 and the 508 Revise

John Foliot wrote:

> Fair point. This however is not the role of W3C, WAI or WCAG, and
> lambasting the W3C because WCAG isn't UAAG serves little purpose other
> than to cast blame on the wrong actors. Beat up on the politicians, not
> the hard-working volunteers who shoulder the bulk of the WAI efforts.

In technical areas, governments often rely on reference to industry 
standards.  My impression is that, in the UK, governmental web sites and 
documents for public campaigns are outsourced to the same people that 
are failing to be controlled by the accessibility legislation, so the 
civil servants have no knowledge of HTML accessibility issues, and may 
well just have experience of doing highly presentational personal pages, 
if they have any experience at all.

As such, whether the W3C wants to be or not, it is a major part of the 
legislative process and needs to assume that its guidelines will, at the 
very least, be the criteria used by courts as to whether or not an 
offence has been committed under accessibility legislation.

Examples, in the UK, in other areas, are that the effective test of 
whether an electrical installation is legal is set by rules written by a 
professional body, the IET.  I can't remember if that is named in the 
legislation by name, but in relation to the management of apartment 
blocks, a document by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors is 
actually called out by name as being a standard of management that will 
form a valid defence against an accusation of mis-management.


-- 
David Woolley
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RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
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Received on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 07:27:11 UTC