I'm sorry to hear you feel the BBC don't care about accessibility, Andy. I'd have to disagree with you.
Our "redefined" definition of accessibility is all about what actually helps disabled people. And creating documents that validate is not something I've ever heard a disabled person ask us to do, or found to be a particular barrier to a disabled person accessing our sites in user testing. It is widely agreed that the W3C WAI WCAG guidelines (they are guidelines, not standards) have always been a good start to trying to help website producers (mostly technical staff) understand what may help their sites to be more accessible. It has also been widely agreed that you can create a AAA compliant site which is totally unusable to a particular disabled person, and create sites which do help disabled people but have to break WCAG guidelines to do that... Even the W3C agree with that, which is why they're spending so long trying to come with a v2 of WCAG to give more help to web professionals in this area. Where our audiences' needs diverge from the requirements of the standards community, I would hope we'd always try and put our audiences' needs first - this is, after all, one of the core values of the BBC. Best regards Jonathan. Jonathan Hassell Editor, Standards & Guidelines, BBC New Media | Accessibility Editor, BBC jam Rm 2318 | White City | 201 Wood Lane | London W12 7TR Mobile: 07919 343686. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andy Sent: 05 December 2007 13:48 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [backstage] BBC Backstage Podcast : Accessibility in a Web 2.0 world? On 03/12/2007, Ian Forrester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I ask the question if we've returned to the days before webstandards > and if there was one thing developers could do now to aid accessibility what would it be? The BBC certainly has returned to the days before standards in that they refuse to follow even the most common ones. They even ignored Accessibility standards from a consortium they are a member of. Spending a fewminutes doing a check and already I have found the BBC failed to comply with priority 2 requirements. Specifically: Checkpoint 3.2 <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#tech-identify-grammar> However instead of actually caring about accessibility and fixing the problems they just "redefined" accessibility. I hope you explained why the BBC does not care about any kind of accessibility. Andy -- Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows. -- Adam Heath - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
