RE: Duplicate Accesskey Values

Hooray! Well said, guy … accessibility appears to have devolved into little more than metrical analysis for the sake of largely unwilling industries and government to mitigate ‘legal risk’, which, in Australia at least, is a paper tiger because the relevant legislation has absolutely no teeth.

 

In Australia, the accessibility ‘profession’ has historically done itself little favour by beating people over the head with spurious and untested legal arguments mostly to drum up business but also, to give accessibility a prominence that it was perceived not to possess.

 

It’s unfortunate as it has backed itself into a corner from which it will be difficult to refocus as accessibility-as-audit has become de facto in all sectors.

 

 

That accessibility is commonly understood as a process of auditing and is performed on behalf of or by testing functions within ICT operations says much about its relative importance in most organisations.

 

Accessibility is a diagnostic activity, elements of which can be performed successfully throughout an information system’s lifecycle, but vested interests have ensured that it remains a narrowly defined activity.

 

 

 

 

From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com> 
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2022 4:40 AM
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Duplicate Accesskey Values

 

I appreciate the importance of raising matters like this, so something can be done about them, perhaps in WCAG 3 or even in a WCAG 2.3. In a practical way, however, this kind of thing is only an issue if we restrict ourselves to "WCAG audits". In my view, all accessibility audits should include both WCAG compliance, and accessibility best practice, and we should be educating our clients (if we are an external auditor), or developer teams (if working in-house in a company) to understand that. We ought to impress on them that they should be aiming to be inclusive of disabled people, not simply doing it to comply with some law or regulation.

 

We do, after all, call ourselves "accessibility consultants", not "WCAG consultants"!