Gian Sampson-Wild wrote:
- WCAG 2.0 has *not* been released yet. Success criteria such as parsed unambiguously and baseline may change significantly before then. I would not recommend completing any work until WCAG 2.0 has been released as a W3C Recommendation
Good point.
- Without spending a significant amount of time reading the documents we need to be careful not to misinterpret particular success criteria. For example, the parsed unambiguously success criteria specifically does *not* require you to validate your documents.
I don't see that as a major problem. Validation is just a tool. It is indeed a very good tool and one that can be used to help meet that success criteria; but it is nothing more than a tool that compares a document against a formally defined grammar.
I'm not saying validation isn't important. I do believe it is very important and I personally insist upon it for any site I develop for many reasons, but such reasons don't usually include accessibility. I believe validation should be part of any good quality assurance process, but I don't believe it should be enforced as a requirement on its own by accessibility guidelines and, by extension, accessibility legislation based on those guidelines.
To me, people who want validation to be directly part of WCAG seem to want to use accessibility as an excuse to validate (i.e. a way to convince marketing depts. and managers of its importance). If validation is to succeed in web development, it should succeed as part of quality assurance and best practices, not be dragged through kicking and screaming with accessibility.
IMHO, producing valid and conformant code does belong in authoring tool guidelines and quality assurance guidelines, but does not belong directly in web accessibility guidelines as anything more than a technique.
- Joe Clark is not talking about rewriting WCAG 2.0 in plain English - he is talking about rewriting the guidelines completely.
Yes, we are aware of that and that's one of the reasons I asked whether this work would be redundant considering the WCAG Samurai. But one of the major problems with WCAG Samurai is that it is a completely closed process that no-one can either get involved with or even keep an eye on without an invitation.
I'm not particularly concerned that participation is strictly limited to the select few, but there really needs to be a way for the community to at least watch from the sidelines and see everything that goes on, even if they can't contribute directly.
- And finally, there is not yet any evidence that we (Australia) will ever need to refer to WCAG 2.0. HREOC - the governing body - may decide to keep referring to WCAG 1.0 instead of WCAG 2.0. They may also decide to write their own set of guidelines.
But if WCAG 2.0 ever does become a recommendation, there will no doubt be some countries that do refer to it even if Australia doesn't. The web is a global medium and, as such, the guidelines will have implications for developers around the world, regardless of their country.
As an example, I've recently been involved with developing a site for a US based organisation and one of the requirements was that it complied with Section 508, even though those guidelines don't apply in Australia. So whether or not Australia adopts WCAG 2.0, Australian developers may still be required to develop sites that comply with them.
-- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
