WCAG 2: The Emperor Defends His New Clothes
I had been planning on taking another little look at what was happening with the old Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) over the next week or so but gosh darn it, Joe Clark has beaten me to it (which reminds me, have you donated any money to his micropatronage project yet?).
Very well, rather than do it myself, I’ll just have a little look at what Joe’s done and instead focus on offering my comments on it.
Joe concentrates on looking at what has been going on in WCAG 2.0 as regards cognitive disability — and comments on some documentation sent his way by working group co-chair Gregg Vanderheiden last week.
Now, to give you a little flavour of the problems as regards WCAG 2.0 and cognitive disability, I’ll just mention that there was a formal objection raised by Lisa Seeman with other signatories, including experts in the field, suggesting that WCAG 2.0’s claim to address cognitive disability is inaccurate and this claim should be removed until the issue has been addressed.
So, has WCAG addressed the issue? Not exactly. It’s more a case that they’ve dismissed it:
we feel that the current draft of WCAG 2.0 includes success criteria that do address many aspects of cognitive disabilities directly or via assistive technology. Given this, we believe it would be inaccurate to remove any claim of addressing cognitive, language and learning disabilitiesGregg Vanderheiden
…oh well, what can you do?
No, seriously, what can you do? Bugger all, it turns out, if you’re a private individual, most charities or indeed anyone not a member of a company large enough to pay whopping great subscription fees to the W3C. So why the hell should we listen to them?
If you aren’t publicly accountable, you’re in no position to be telling anyone else what to do.
Of course, this has been raised before — most prominently by the esteemed Eric Meyer — but it’s not going to go away unless the W3C do something to address it.
Then, Gregg appears to use two discrete statements without being aware of the influence of one upon the other. First we have:
It is the expectation of the W3C that WCAG will be used as a primary international accessibility standard. Therefore, it must be applicable to all Web content and achievable on all sitesGregg Vanderheiden
This seems perfectly reasonable. WCAG 1.0 is widely known, and it is being enshrined in terms of Governmental recommendations for public sector sites, so it seems likely that the same will apply to WCAG 2.0 once it is released and stable.
But then Gregg adds this:
We have also been careful to structure the success criteria so they don’t prevent authors from following additional cognitive-specific accessibility guidelines. Where possible, we provide our own additional recommendations in the form of advisory techniquesGregg Vanderheiden
Does he not realise that the only people who bother to read the advisory techniques are those who are passionate about accessibility in the first place? The majority of web designers don’t worry about WCAG too much (if at all), and of the ones that do, the vast majority won’t go reading hundreds of thousands of words of documentation to scour every last little bit of information — they will quite reasonably assume that if it is important, it will be in the list of checkpoints.
If they don’t find it in the list of checkpoints, they will again, reasonably assume that it’s not that important. If it’s not that important, then WCAG isn’t covering it and the formal objection should be upheld. Okay, so maybe it’s difficult to devise a formal test for the cognitive disability checkpoints, but which of these two things do you think should be the main concern of WCAG?
- Ensuring that web content is accessibile to people with disabilities
- Ensuring that they can devise an accurate test for each web content guideline
It maybe comes down to a matter of opinion; I’d suggest the first is more important, and it looks like the WCAG WG think that the second is more important. But of course, because they work for a business that pays vast sums of money to the W3C every year, their opinion counts, and mine doesn’t.
But what they are doing is to invite a number of people who’ve raised issues over WCAG 2.0 and cognitive disability to take part in a conference call to discuss the matter further.
It’s a start, but unfortunately for me these is still far too much emphasis in WCAG 2.0 that it’s a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine attempt to make content accessible to users with disabilities, and this rather telling quote sums it up:
One of the goals of WCAG 2.0 is to minimize its effect on author freedom. Guidelines that impact mainstream presentation tend not to be followed because authors have specific design and content objectives that they are not willing to compromise.Gregg Vanderheiden
Right. Okaaaay.. So because people haven’t been complying with the guidelines and making their content accessible, we’re instead going to dilute the guidelines to such a level that people will be complying with them virtually by default. Gregg seems to have lost the plot here: the most important issue is that web content is accessible to them. Whether or not it complies with guidelines is of little interest to the majority of users. It’s only relevant to the box-tickers.
That way everyone can create accessible websites! We’ve dropped any requirement for validity as well, so you can use as many tables and deprecated elements as you like! Bring back the
FONTtag! All of those big businesses with big software packages which were previously inaccessible will now be accessible!The rather inconvenient fact that it’s these businesses which fund the W3C is entirely coincidental.
Imaginary Blurb for WCAG 2.0
After all, when you really get down to it, what’s more important? Keeping the businesses which fund the W3C happy, or making content accessible to users with disabilities?
But let’s be fair about this: WCAG 2.0 does present a number of guidelines which are of benefit to users with cognitive disability, and Gregg provides a list of these. Many of them are repeated multiple times, which gives the effect of making the list look as though it contains more than the actual number of different checkpoints it does, but I’m not implying anything suspicious about this because it is quite sensibly broken down by type of cognitive disability and some things obviously help multiple categories.
It is fair to accept that WCAG 2.0 does cover some issues that relate to cognitive disability, but the decisions that have been taken to be technologically and internationally neutral have hamstrung the document as regards accessibility.
For example, two of the most common things that cause problems for dyslexic users are right-justified text (causing the “rivers of white” phenomena), and text which is too small and can’t be resized. Neither of these warrant so much as a single success criterion. Of course, under The Emperor’s New Clothes of WCAG 2.0, they couldn’t appear at level 1 or 2 anyway, because both level 1 and 2 success criteria must be able to be appropriate to all web content.
Yes, rather than have a “pass” “fail” or “doesn’t apply” option, the WCAG WG are quite happy to shift something down to priority level three (or whatever that is called these days) if it doesn’t necessarily apply in every circumstance. Only applies if you read left-to-right? Not in there, but the best it could hope for would be level three. Only applies for those types of content that are resizable? Again, resizable text isn’t in there but the best it could hope for would be level three.
Rather than persisting with this dead duck, why don’t the WCAG WG admit that they’ve made some mistakes, they need to re-assess WCAG and start again? If something is of particular importance, or of particular benefit — such as the ability to resize text — it belongs in WCAG, whether or not it could apply to every conceivable circumstance or not.
The time has come for the W3C and the WCAG WG to decide which path they want to follow: do they want to follow convenience at the expense of accessibility? Or do they want to follow the path of making content accessible to users with disabilities? There’s no reason why this would need to be more inconvenient in most circumstances: build in convenience, neutrality and testablility where you can, but for goodness sake, stop doing it at the expense of accessibility.
Are they prepared to look down and see the document they are valiantly trying to force upon us is taking them away from accessible websites? Or will they insist on the rest of us wearing The Emperor’s New Accessibility Guidelines?
Hello. I am 
Good topic, well covered and researched.
Personally, I feel unless its easily validates via an external tool like the offline version of Watchfire WCAG, it’s not worth my time as a developer testing against.
I only know of the Watchfire program (which you have to buy over telephone) which tests a whole website on your computer for accessibility and gives you really helpful advice about how to resolve accessibility problems. What program do you use?
Any tools for WCAG 1, or 2 must be made freely available to all to verify accessibility, but equally solutions must be readily available for all to understand and to implement; or else the very word “accessibility” will become an ironic statement based upon the vacuousness of the very subject itself.
Ah, Amarjit, there is the crux of the problem.
To put it bluntly, an automated tool cannot tell you whether or not a website is accessible. What it can do — and can do well is to automatically check certain things — like whether or not your pages validate, and whether or not your images have alt text.
It can’t do the clever stuff and decide what the meaning is that the image provides to your page, and whether or not your alt text it appropriate.
Remember to use your automated tools just as a starting point. But as tools go, I’d recommend:
1.Chris Pederick’s web developer toolbar for firefox
2.Vision Australia’s Accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer and Opera
3.the TAW3 automated accessibility checker
…I’ll update this with links when I get time…