Re: Your definition of WCAG2.0 conformance

On 03/02/2015 03:13 AM, Oscar Cao wrote:
> Hello all
>
> I have been thinking for the past few days.
>
> Some people don’t care about coding standards, their view of conformance
> is: as long as keyboard users and blind users are catered for, they’re
> conformant.

I don't know what some people's ideas of conformance is, but my idea is 
of accessible is that whatever can be done to make the experience for 
those with "impairments" as close as possible to the experience for 
"bulk users" as possible should be done.

That's why, for example, the very first link on a page should point to 
main content. I can visually skip over other stuff with my eyes and I 
usually do, so the first link should make it easy for someone in a non 
visual browser to do the same - and stuff like that I would have never 
even thought about if it weren't for WCAG.

I think it is sad that Google, Bing, etc. all have web master tools that 
check for usability but don't bother to check for stuff like that.

And that's what I see as the purpose of all this, helping people like me 
who want to accommodate everyone understand what the issues are, because 
it is difficult to guess what they are unless I am told.

>
> This has prompted me to think – what about the visual user, power user,
> everyone else? Since there’s nowhere in WCAG2.0 that mentions anything
> that covers us – the bulk of the users that do not have any known
> impairments as such.

That's not it's function, and there are plenty of well funded utilities 
to check how well the UI is for the bulk of users.

>
> I started thinking about user-friendly URIs. For my personal sites, I
> will not accept anything less than user-friendly/search engine-optimised
> URIs. Would you consider a site that does not have any clear structure
> (i.e. the entire site’s pages sits on the root folder, even though the
> navigation shows them as below another page). Or having URIs with upper
> and lowercase letters mixed (assuming they’ve configured the server to
> ignore the casing in the URIs). Or URIs with joined words like:
> http://mydomain.com/shop/Basket/ViewBasket/EmptyBasket. Keeping in mind
> that, all the references within the website works.

I almost never type in a URL manually anymore. If I did not follow a 
hyperlink in, then either I can easily get to where I'm going from the 
homepage or I leave. The structure beyond the home page doesn't matter 
to me.

Michael

Received on Monday, 2 March 2015 12:39:29 UTC