Stuff WCAG, Let’s do it ourselves!
Okay, I know this is something I’ve spoken about before but one of the things that I think is a shame is that rather than going through each guideline and assessing it’s importance to disabled users or users in the UK, the UK Government have mandated that UK Public Sector sites meet the WCAG Guidelines at the WCAG Double-A conformance level.
As I showed in my Be Accessible, Don’t Meet Guidelines article, it is possible to fail certain of the WCAG checkpoints at Priority 1 or 2 and have a negligible impact upon the actual accessibility of your website to real users.
I am therefore suggesting that the UK Government and the decision makers to take a look at the existing guidelines, look at best practice documents and compile their own standards against which they expect sites to measure up (but by all means use WCAG as a starting point, for which it is an excellent document). This document should then be reviewed and updated on a regular basis (at least annually) so we’re not left with the farcical situation that WCAG is currently in where the existing documents are very dated but the new version of the documents are far from ready.
For example, the Cabinet Office site shows a recommendation:
Set a clear target for making all public sector websites in the EU conform with WCAG 1.0 Level Double-A by 2010 as part of the i2010 strategy to promote an inclusive European information society.Cabinet Office
By this time WCAG 1.0 will have been replaced by WCAG 2.0, and so public sector websites will be asked to conform to a set of guidelines that even the organisation who produced them no longer thinks is appropriate. Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to have our own, either at UK or EU level?
Not that I’m saying anyone should just take my word for it, least of all the EU or the UK Government, but nor should they automatically take the word of the W3C, when in order to contribute to the W3C, you need to either be an invited expert, or you need to be an employee of an organisation paying significant annual membership fees, which vary according to your country — between €6,500 and €65,000 if you’re in the UK (see their fee calculator). There is no way of joining as a private individual; if you don’t have the money, and they don’t invite you to join as an invited expert, then you’re not welcome. So why should we assume these are the only people entitled to contribute to the development of accessibility and standards on the internet?
Of course, we have Eric Meyer’s call for W3C change where he suggests it should become a financially independent entity, rather than the current member-funded organisation with the problems he sees coming from this. In short: that if you don’t belong to a company who pays, you can’t play; the perception that the W3C is therefore controlled by the organisations funding it, and that full financial independence would allow the W3C to do more independent things.
Regardless of what actually happens with the W3C, I see no reason why the EU or the UK should simply assume that an external organisation “knows best”. It’s time to see what guidelines actually are required for our users on today’s internet…
I’m aware of the potential risks of having too many guidelines, but I’m talking solely about guidelines for Public Sector websites in the UK. That’s the same sector which already has to comply with things like the Disability Equality Duty, that have to comply with Cabinet Office and EU regulations, so why not choose the guidelines that are most appropriate for Public Sector sites, rather than accepting an arbitrary level from an external body?
So, what do we think should be mandatory for public sector websites, at least in the UK?
Well, here’s my opinion — remember that I’m not covering everything, merely those things that I think should be mandatory — I’ve left out some things (such as fluid design, avoidance of deprecated elements and attributes) that I would recommend but don’t think need to be insisted upon, because I don’t think they in themselves make a site inaccessible to someone with disabilities, providing the site is put together properly. Although I’d still rather people had fluid sites with a strict DOCTYPE. Anyway, here you go…
Layout & Design
- Do not cause your content to flicker or blink
- Do not provide any meaning that is only conveyed by colour
- Ensure that all information and function is available if stylesheets are not supported
- Ensure all text and its background, and meaningful information on an image, and its background, have a luminosity contrast ratio of at least 5:1
- Do not right-justify text
- Do not use ALL CAPS for large blocks of text
- Ensure that text is resizable using standard browsers
Function & Interaction
- Functions are not time-dependent except where this is an integral part of the function or real-time interaction is taking place
- All functions can be fully accessed without the keyboard only.
- Do not open new windows without warning the user
- Provide a site map, search facility or contents page if your site is has more than 10 pages.
- Have a consistent look and feel for site navigation across the entire site.
- Have a logical tab order throughout the entire page
- Ensure all information can be accessed, and all functions can be carried out, without the use of javascript (or only using javascript functions from a tested and approved list)
- Ensure any transactions provide an opportunity to review and confirm data before submission or that they are easily reversible.
Page Structure
- Ensure your pages validate to a published specification
- Use style sheets to control layout and presentation
- Use headers according to specification to break up information into meaningful chunks
- Mark up lists of items appropriately as lists
- Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects unless a quotation is being used
- Do not use tables for layout
- Ensure all form elements have meaningful labels that are explicitly associated with them.
Content
- Use Plain English
- Provide audio descriptions and captions for pre-recorded multimedia
- Provide text descriptions for live multimedia
- Indicate changes in language for passages of text in a different language
- Ensure all non-text items that convey information have alternative text that conveys equivalent information
- Ensure that link text is meaningful when read out of context
- Provide or link to definitions for jargon or unusual word meanings
- Expand (in text or via markup) at least the first occurrence of any abbreviation or acronym on each page.
Summing Up
Obviously in any official document, these points would need to be expanded on in more detail. Nor would I expect everyone to agree with my choices — but I do think we should be having a debate on whether or not we should automatically follow WCAG to a specific priority level, whether we should choose the appropriate guidelines from WCAG to be followed (i.e. mix and match across levels), whether to ignore WCAG and come up with our own entirely new set of guidelines, or whether to use WCAG as a base but adjust as deemed necessary (as I’ve done here, with bits of WCAG 1, WCAG 2, and at least one thing that doesn’t appear in either).
Hello. I am 
I’m pretty much with you on this. This year has been a bit of a nightmare for me, where I’ve been left to interpret the exisiting WCAG guidelines and then give a spec to outside contractors for a council site.
Because there is no official document for government websites, it ends up as my interpretation of what I think is ‘AA’. I’ve been lucky because we’ve had a designer/htmler who really knew their onions, so I’ve been able to work with them to get what we want, which is a new website that’s far more accessible than our old one. And meeting our ‘targets’.
But another web project has been hell because a different contractor has played ‘dumb’ on WCAG and I’ve had to spec absolutely everything in detail and really put my foor down, resulting in arguments and horror meetings because they aren’t bothered. And it’s therefore hard for me to put the argument across to ‘the people who make decisions’ my end because they also depend on my interpretation of WCAG and my success in articulating it. ‘AA’ has become a dodgy buzzword, with everyone nodding in agreement and repeating it, but not really understanding its meaning.
So without going into the ins and outs of what it should be saying, I agree that we need an official document. And preferably in plain English.
No, no, no. 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.
The rest is kind of OK, though I have quibbles.
That’s a fair point, Joe. I still don’t like “click here” links but you maybe right that it should be an advisory rather than a requirement — if I’m understanding you correctly.
I’m not claiming to “know best” after all, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you - or anyone else - had more serious objections than just “quibbles”. It’s really just a list a threw together so if it ever was to be used as the basis for something, I know it would need more work anyway.
How interoperable is this on a European level? So far EU member states have more or less followed WCAG 1.0, but what if every state defines its own, and possibly contradicting, accessibility guidelines? Which national law should be supported by authors, web developers, or browser vendors then?
Martin,
it’s quite simple. I’m in the UK, my site is hosted in the UK, so I’d use the UK guidelines. If I was in Denmark, I’d use the Danish guidelines. If you’re selling goods in the UK, ensure they comply with UK regulations. If you’re selling goods in Germany, ensure that they comply with German ones. It’s hardly difficult or novel as countries already have their own laws as it is.
In practice, many of the guidelines could be commonplace across the EU, but as Mel Pedley noted in her accessites article, different countries have different rates of dyslexia because of different language structures.
It may therefore be appropriate to pay closer attention to the problems of dyslexia in one language than another. It may be appropriate to have one set of rules for all “English language” sites, but other languages might be better off with rules custom tailored to themselves (or indeed problems specific to a particular country).
In this case, we have to remember why we’re pushing accessibility: to help users. If we can help users in a particular country more by having a specific standard tailored to their needs, then why not do it?
Although I do have to say, I’d not specifically have anything against a pan-European base for the standard, but the key points are that what is suitable for one group (e.g. higher contrast) may cause problems for another (e.g. those with Scoptic sensitivity) and so it makes sense to tailor the requirements to the individual populations and characteristics of the language, rather than assuming one size will always fit all.
You wouldn’t give every disabled person a wheelchair, so why assume that the nature of disability and disability related difficulties is identical across different languages? In which case it would make perfect sense for the guidelines of a country with a high proportion of Scoptic sensitivity sufferers to look for different colour contrast standards to a country with a very low proportion.
But the key, key point is that any standard of this nature to be adopted must be revised on at least a yearly basis otherwise it’s frankly not worth having.