/Access all areas/ Guidelines and standards
29/07/2009 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
This month Alastair Campbell gives us a quick tour of the different accessibility guidelines and standards you should be aware of
When people throw around phrases like ‘DDA compliant’, what do they mean? After a couple of years talking about specific accessibility issues, it’s about time we covered the standards and guidelines that people refer to.
Most .net readers know of the W3C: the source of standards we use every day, such as HTML and CSS. But not so many people know that a significant part of the W3C is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which not only produces accessibility standards (or ‘guidelines’), but also checks other standards for accessibility.
The granddaddy of accessibility standards are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1). These came out in 1999 and have formed the standard list of web accessibility requirements for almost 10 years. While some checkpoints are woefully out of date (such as requiring that forms are pre-filled with a default), the concepts behind them really haven’t changed in that time.
The upcoming WCAG version 2 is essentially rewriting the guidelines to be technology agnostic, allowing for technologies like Flash and scripting more easily. The document sets out ‘success criteria’ for meeting these guidelines, based on how they work rather than the detail of the technology.
Other accessibility standards from the WAI are for authoring tools (such as content management systems) and user agents (for example, browsers and screen readers). These are the other aspects of creating and using websites, and reading about them can help you understand who’s responsible for which aspect. To enable accessibility for Ajax-style interactions, you can use the WAI-ARIA.
The process that W3C guidelines go through is incredibly thorough and when I find research from people looking at specific issues (age related disabilities, for example), their conclusions almost always match the WCAG guidelines. With the W3C’s being the most inclusive and thorough, other accessibility standards are usually based on WCAG.
In the US they have ‘Section 508’ legislation, which is essentially a sub-set of WCAG, and should be applied to any web technology bought by the government there. In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act barely mentions websites and doesn’t refer to the W3C’s guidelines. However, guidance documents issued since do include websites and a case is very likely to refer to the W3C. Still, it’s worth remembering that there’s no such thing as DDA compliant!
For the less technically inclined, the great acronym ‘PAS78’ was a document aimed at helping people procure accessible websites. Since then, the British Standards Institution has set out to transform PAS 78 into the first British standard for web accessibility. The aim is to complement current technical guidelines and provide relevant information, and it’s currently undergoing public consultation. Read Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance (Apress) for more about the legal and standards aspects.
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Comments
Andy Walpole / 29/07/2009 / 13:14 / http://www.suburban-glory.com
The W3C guide to WCAG 2.0 must be the most un-user friendly page I've ever seen - it's a great bit list with loads of sub-lists and tons of blue links flying off everywhere.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
Hopefully in future .net issues Alastair will be able to list more readable guides for webmasters
David B. / 07/08/2009 / 06:47
Ironically - this site does not comply to basic web accessibility guidlines for text re-size, or for displaying highly visible keyboard focus for links and interactive regions.
Lenny / 12/10/2009 / 15:28 / http://www.gwmarketing.co.uk
If you run Google, Bing or Yahoo through the W3C validation service, they all fail miserably. Amazon UK has to be the worst I have ever seen though, with the site clocking up over 1366 errors!!! - That score may even be a record?
Ben W / 08/11/2009 / 20:31 / http://www.beachsoftware.co.uk
Just because a website fails automated tests doesn't mean it's not accessible. Amazon may have a lot of validation errors but it might still be accessible - i'm pretty sure they would have spent some serious money on their website and would have invested time and money into maing sure its accessible enough to do what it does so well and sell sell sell.
I think it was in an article in the mag, website accessibility isn't about passing computer automated tests.
Thats not to say that 1386 isn't a massive score!
