> -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Foskett > > Hi all, > > I'm about to rewrite the technical standards for the acceptance > of external, and independent, web resources. > At present they are only guidelines and they suggest: > . Compliance to WAI priority one (plus a little). > . W3C validated coding with allowable exceptions. E.g. > Flash / Framesets. > > These guidelines were set over 18 months ago. > Now they are due for review prior to the final part of the DDA > coming into UK law. > > It would be improper for me to dictate full WAI compliance if it > is not a legal necessity. > Though it is a requirement to insist on meeting the legal minimum. > > I was thinking as a minimum: > 1. Alt tags for all: Navigation images, form image > buttons and text in images. > 2. Colour must not be used as the sole method of > highlighting information 3. No flickering or blinking in > images or text. > 4. Data tables require row and column headers. (same as > priority one) > 5. Each frame requires a title and must point to a valid > (X)HTML document. 6. Ensure that content areas are available > and navigable with JavaScript / Java applets / Flash switched off. > 7. Supply a text transcript to multimedia objects. > 8. Ensure sufficient colour contrast. > 9. Content available and navigable via keyboard. > 10. Implicit form label associations (title before input). > Along with recommendations to fully comply with the WAI priority > one and W3C validation. > > > What do you think? Too much or too little? > > > cheers. > > > mike 2k:)2 >
That looks pretty good (to me), just as long as you cover WCAG1 P1 you have covered basic accessibility issues. It's a good point to remember that WCAG1 was released way back in 1999 and the WAI-GL did not want to make their specifications restrictive, so they developed 3 levels of priority. The first was that in order to make your site accessible you *must* cover WCAG P1 requirements. No matter what your site was developed in, any kind of quirks mode hybrid of HTML, this was what you must do if you wanted to make your site accessible. After you had do that you had basically done enough to make the inaccessible accessible. Then if you wanted to adopt more accessibility into your design, you could apply WCAG1 P2, but back then the support for CSS, DOCTYPE and all these standards was flacky, so the term *should* was used for P2 requirements and *may* for P3. If you take the approach, like most standards based developers today, to adopt P2 (and P3) requirements, much of P1 begins to be less of an issue because you don't get so caught in bad design implementations (semantically speaking). For instance, if you are fully utilising markup as 3.1 indicates (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-use-markup) then anything that is a textual representation should be marked up appropriately rather than put into an image of text, which means you are only providing alt text for media that is uniquely an image or whatever. It used to be stated on the WAI site a few years back (not too obviously) that to really claim to be an accessible site you needed to meet both P1 & P2, but that was pretty tough then considering the support from user agents for the standards required to meet P2, the evolution of CSS, etc, so it's better to just keep the requirement of P1. But developers that follow standards, like those on this list are pretty much focused on addressing the P2 core, and even P3, just by the nature of their approach to standards and design. WCAG2 is still in draft, but it has a much more mature flavour. There is a much stronger element of usability about it http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ The WAI-GL are really trying to bring out something that more clearly expresses the issues. Geoff ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
