- From: Alastair Campbell <alastc@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2013 00:01:39 +0100
- To: Gregg Vanderheiden <gv@trace.wisc.edu>
- Cc: Jorge Fernandes <jorge.f@netcabo.pt>, WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
I'm in a privileged position of seeing the results of both WCAG2 based audits and usability testing with people who have disabilities. Sometimes even on the same site! I concur with Steve's assessment of the research (again from a very quick skim), and Greg's points, we tend to use testing with people to prioritise what matters in the site's context, and an audit to get the technical picture of the site. When doing that sort of research it is easy to be critical of WCAG, however, the real question is how you prevent usability / accessibility issues in the first place. If you use a design process that results in a usable site (often a UCD process), then WCAG can be used for what it was intended to be - a technical, minimum set of guidelines. I wouldn't fault WCAG for focusing on aspects that only affect PWD, but everyone needs to understand that there is a venn diagram of issues that affect PWD, and a big circle of that is general usability issues. -Alastair
Received on Sunday, 2 June 2013 23:02:10 UTC