WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft?
Principle 1: Making Content Perceivable
The perceivability guidelines and success criteria cover pretty much the areas you’d expect them to: text alternatives for non-text content, how to handle CAPTCHAs, which are “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and decorative images, as well as detailing the appropriate methods for handling live audio feeds, pre-recorded multimedia, identifying relationships and sequences, colour differences and so on.
There really isn’t much in the way of surprises here: basically the guidelines that fall within this principle are all about ensuring that however you’ve structured and put together your content, the meaning of it can still be ascertained by someone with a disability.
It’s important to note that while HTML validity is not specifically required — but I’ll come to that under Principles: Robustness — the semantic use of HTML (or equivalent technology) is specifically identified:
1.3.1 Info and Relationships: Information and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text, and notification of changes to these is available to user agents, including assistive technologies. (Level A) — WCAG 2.0 (4)
G115: Using semantic elements to mark up structure and H49: Using semantic markup to mark emphasized or special text (HTML) — WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference (1)
There you have it: one of the ways — in fact the primarily recommended way — in which to ensure that information and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined is to use semantic coding in the first place. The techniques expand further, highlighting using list and heading markup properly, and so on.
It is therefore apparent that while validity may no longer be required (and trust me, I will get to that!), the semantic use of HTML is required, and is more specifically required than it ever was in WCAG 1.0, which — although it too requires data tables to be marked up properly at level A — does not require semantic use of elements such as lists and headers, or indeed form controls with associated labels until level AA.
In contrast with previous perceptions then — including my own — WCAG 2.0 is actually more stringent in it’s requirements for semantic HTML than WCAG 1.0 ever was. Good for them.
One of the biggest weaknesses in WCAG 1.0 has also been addressed: WCAG 1.0 did not explicitly demand that text was resizable. In WCAG 2.0 from level AA you must be able to resize text between 50% and 200% without losing content or function.
Principle 2: Making Content Operable
As you might guess, the success criteria relating to operability all relate to interactions with the website — what can you do with it now that you can perceive the content that is on there?
This can be boiled down to a series of questions:
- Can you operate it with a keyboard?
- Is the input time independent?
- Can you switch off interruptions?
- Do you avoid flashing/blinking?
- You have got skip links, haven’t you?
…and so on.
These are generally handled sensibly: time independence allows for exceptions where you’re dealing with real-time events, or where time is essential such as time-based testing.
Skip links may be more problematical:
2.4.1 Bypass Blocks: A mechanism is available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple Web pages. (Level A) — WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference (2)
Joe Clark has already taken exception to this, pointing out that:
You can put a few hundred navigation links on a single page and do nothing more, but if you have two pages together that have three navigation links each, you must provide a way to skip navigation. — Joe Clark in “To Hell With WCAG 2”
The Working Group accept this, but their Understanding WCAG 2.0 document makes it plain that the intent of this success criterion is to save people with particular disabilities from needing to step through headings, navigation, graphics etc on every individual page when they are simply seeking to locate the content.
Joe certainly makes a valid point here, because one page with hundreds of links would actually be more onerous that two pages each with three navigation links, but I think despite the fact that this success criterion isn’t perfect and cases can be found that it misses, the fact that the majority of sites are constructed with repeating blocks of navigation means that this will serve a useful purpose.
In addition to this, this section of the document talks about things being meaningful — pages should have meaningful titles (level A), descriptive labels (level AA) and the purpose of each link should be able to be determined from the link and its associated context (level A).
I seem to recall Joe Clark telling me that this shouldn’t be necessary:
There should be no requirement that links (or headings or honeybees or uranium deposits or anything else) make sense when read out of context. They are not out of context in the author’s work and are not meant to be spontaneously remixed. Do not write guidelines to suit kooky fun features of Jaws — Joe Clark commenting on “Stuff WCAG, let’s do it ourselves”
Again, he has a very valid point. Why should we? My answer would be because some people will benefit from it. That’s not a perfect answer, and it doesn’t really get to the bottom of why we expect the pages to make sense when you chop them up and read them out of context, but it will get rid of those “click here” links that annoy me.
Yes, I know that “annoying me” doesn’t directly relate to accessibility, but I personally am still glad they’ve said “To Hell With Click Here Links…”
Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 5:33 am →
It certainly looks as if a great deal of the feedback on last year’s draft has had a positive effect. Whilst I’d agree that the current draft isn’t perfect (and probably never will be), it is beginning to look as the Working Group is in the right road to creating a usable, practical, set of guidelines.
The current deadline for submitting comments on the WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is 29 June 2007. The feedback from last year’s draft seems to have had a real positive effect. Let’s not let the opportunity to comment on this draft slip away either.
patrick h. lauke responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 5:39 am →
nice write-up. i’m currently on the last few pages of the appendix (only reading through the core WCAG 2.0 document, not the associated techniques etc) myself, and will soon be sending my comments off.
on the issue of “having complete start and end tags” … that whole thing just sounds awkward in the guidelines. you can tell they tried to carefully pussy-foot around the issue without saying “valid”…but by doing so, they’ve come up with something that seems very (X)HMTL specific. what i’ll be proposing is something more along the lines of: “must be well formed and follow the language’s syntax rules” (as “well formed”, i.e. following syntax, does not necessarily mean “valid”).
goetsu responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 5:51 am →
I am totaly agree with you, this version was a major improvement, wcag 2 or now understandable. But, i think there is still mistake, lake or change that need to be made on the technique and Understanding Success Criterion document. Particulary, i think that guideline 3 and 4 need a lot more of exemple and failure exemple.
Clive Walker responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 7:43 am →
In order to get web designers/developers on board with the WCAG 2 guidelines, I think the checkpoint document has to be much shorter. The current version may be OK for a large web design company who can spend time and resources on this, but for the smaller company or freelancer, it has to be easily assimilated. The WCAG 1 document is very good for this. The WCAG 2 document is likely to put people off in my opinion [even if it can be shortened using the options you describe]. This applies particularly to non-experts who would like to learn more about accessibility and want to do better.
John Faulds responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 8:40 am →
I agree with Clive. I don’t have time to try and digest all the guidelines myself at the moment so the best I can do is keep an eye out for summaries like this one. Thanks, Jack!
Noemi responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 8:49 am →
Thanks for putting together this great write-up. I’d seen a lot of the criticisms of the working draft, and was ready to dismiss the present document as well, but now I’m re-thinking it.
Here’s a question for those who have actually read the document: does it contain any recommendations or requirements beyond the accessibility best-practices that have been circulated in the web standards community for the past few years?
By the way, there are a lot of gremlins in the text-only version of this article, at least in Firefox on WinXP.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 9:08 am →
@Clive: Good point. Make it too daunting and people will run away, especially the little guys who see it from an ant’s perspective.
It is a step in the right direction, though, better than before, and thanks to Jack’s hard work in writing this up, it seems more palatable than it previously did.
@Noemi: Thanks, I’ll get out my gremlin swatter.
Update: Gotta love “Find and Replace.” The text version gremlins have been swatted
Respiro, the logo design guy responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 9:12 am →
Great article! Thanks!
Paul Armstrong responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 9:26 am →
You’re complaining about the length of the WCAG documents?
And just how many words is this THREE PAGE post??? 4000+? That’s longer than most University-level essays.
Grant Broome responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 10:05 am →
Lovely post Jack, good level of detail as always.
No more ‘web units’ eh? That’s the best thing I’ve heard for weeks. Who’s crumby idea was that in the first place. I feel inclined to take another look at the guidelines now after previously writing them off Joe Clark stylee. This post has addressed the major concerns, thanks for taking the time Jack.
Henny responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 11:49 am →
Thanks for the write up, really useful. I agree that you can read WCAG 2.0 in a way that works best for you and not necessarily all at once. The Quick Reference document also seems like to good way in especially as you can make it yopur own by customising it.
I posted about in the RNIB Blog a couple of days ago which I hope people will find useful.
Joe Clark responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 2:36 pm →
“Click here” and “more” as link text are explicitly permitted.
Defying document semantics and the document tree just because somebody’s toy can mix and match headings is not equivalent to “accessibility,” and if convenience features were the threshold, who knows what else would get in there.
Jack Pickard responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2007 at 7:52 pm →
Whoops! Joe is right about the click here thing… and here’s the specific reference:
I think that’s a shame to be honest, but like Joe says, it’s not really about convenience. Okay, I would have personally preferred it if you couldn’t have used “click here”, but I still think that the rest of it is sound…
links for 2007-05-26 « Richard@Home responds:
Posted: May 26th, 2007 at 12:19 am →
[…] WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft? - Accessites.org Accessites looks at the latest WCAG with a favourable report. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s definitely progressing in the right direction. (tags: accessibility wcag) […]
Wild Ted responds:
Posted: May 26th, 2007 at 2:31 am →
Great write up, for which many thanks.
Just one small point on “click here” and “more” as link text.
Whatever the accessibility rights or wrongs, “click here” and “more” are search engine optimisation opportunities gone begging. However, if you use link text such a “more on hot topic 1″ and hide all but the word “more” offscreen with CSS you will keep both Google and JAWS users happy.
Web Community seems a Little More Positive on the Latest WCAG 2.0 Draft « Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog responds:
Posted: May 26th, 2007 at 11:52 am →
[…] There has also been a bit of positive feedback. Jack Pickard wrote the following… It’s usable, it’s a vast improvement on the previous draft, and it’s an improvement on WCAG 1.0 as well. […]
goetsu responds:
Posted: May 27th, 2007 at 6:14 am →
by the way, about the text resize criteria, read carfuly the suffisent technique and you will see you can perfectly still use pixel text-size just because ie7 and opera have a zoom mode (to break the opera’s zoom, good luke) or just because you use font-size widget in pure javascript on your page.
» WCAG 2.0 Working Draft May 2007: A closer look responds:
Posted: May 28th, 2007 at 2:13 pm →
[…] You don’t have to wait until I manage to read it, understand it, and write something about my opinion on it though. Jack Pickard has already done that work, and presents his verdict in WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft?, an article split into three pages (WCAG is a large document, so commenting on it may require using quite a few words after all). […]
Jared Smith responds:
Posted: May 29th, 2007 at 5:31 pm →
With a write-up like that, who needs to read the guidelines?!? Of course we all do, but this write-up is excellent for anyone not already familiar with the guidelines.
That there is about the most witty thing I’ve ever read and pretty much sums up the entire validity argument. It’s interesting that you have been swayed on this regard. But with logic as clear as you present it, I think more people will understand why validity might not be best implemented in WCAG.
Gregg Vanderheiden responds:
Posted: May 31st, 2007 at 12:49 am →
Thanks everyone. We are looking for your comments and input on the new draft. What you like and what you don’t.
A couple of documents that are helpful in reviewing the newest draft and seeing what changed and why.
1) A document that highlights the changes in WCAG 2.0 along with context is now available. It is at http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/05/change-summary.
The major overall changes are discussed up front along with rationale. Then it goes through each success criterion that has changed and lists the changes. The document length issue is one topic discussed.
2) An improved Quick Reference now allows you more flexibility for including just the information you would like.
Use the customization feature at the top to have only the information you would like shown. The Quick Reference will vary in length from just a few pages on up depending on how little or how much information you want included.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
Looking forward to hearing what you like and any issues you see.
Thanks
Robert Wellock responds:
Posted: June 1st, 2007 at 10:07 am →
The Quick Reference seems a little wordy in places and also appears to be contradicting itself in certain paragraphs or that maybe it is just the fuzzy-wording.
ThePickards » Blog Archive » WCAG 2.0: The Next Draft responds:
Posted: June 2nd, 2007 at 5:26 pm →
[…] As the more astute of you will have noticed, I have already commented on the latest draft of WCAG 2.0 having written a review of WCAG 2.0 for Accessites just over a week ago. Why not pop over there to read it if you haven’t already? […]
WCAG: Recomendaciones de accesibilidad « Soldat’s log responds:
Posted: June 10th, 2007 at 3:16 am →
[…] Pues bien, a mediados del mes pasado la W3C publicó el nuevo borrador de la WCAG 2.0, esta vez con mejores críticas (WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft?), y hace un par de días se publicó la primera edición de WCAG Samurai Errata for WCAG 1.0. […]
A review of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, May 2007 Working Draft - The Web Standards Project responds:
Posted: June 11th, 2007 at 8:40 am →
[…] Jack Pickard, WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft? […]
WebAIM: Blog - WCAG 2.0 - Polishing the rough edges responds:
Posted: June 27th, 2007 at 5:49 pm →
[…] I am not intimately familiar with WCAG 2.0. I’ve followed its development and was even accepted at one time as a WCAG working group member, although I’ve ashamedly never really participated. So, I am mostly looking at WCAG 2.0 from an outsider’s perspective. As such, many of my concerns may be entirely due to misunderstanding the language or structure of the guidelines themselves. Yet if I have encountered such misinterpretations, it’s quite likely that someone less familiar with accessibility will have them also. Jack Pickard has written an excellent writeup on WCAG 2.0. I almost entirely agree with his conclusions (particularly those surrounding validity) and will not address the specific issues that he has brought up. […]
Search Engine Optimization » Blog Archive » A review of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, May 2007 Working Draft responds:
Posted: July 6th, 2007 at 11:43 pm →
[…] Jack Pickard, WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft? […]