Call for a WCAG Blog
I was a little surprised, and more than a little interested to haphazardly discover through pretty much random browsing that the CSS working group have a blog. I had a bit of a read through it, and discovered some really neat ideas in the pipeline, including contour-based floats.
Now that’s neat. Really neat.
The CSS working group also tried to debunk a few myths about themselves: namely, that they are too insular, don’t welcome feedback and that standards are being held back by Microsoft. Intriguingingly, it appears that the CSS Working group has broadly the same problems of perception that the WCAG Working Group suffer from.
How successful this myth-busting is remains to be seen: I don’t recall the CSS Working Group Blog being announced to any great fanfare, so it may be that it’s only actually been seen by a handful of people.
Interestingly, one of the stated reasons for having a CSS blog is that:
the members of the working group want to reach a wider audience and solicit comments from people who aren’t (yet) on the mailing listCSS Blog
I think that this is a great idea. Mainly because contributing to a public mailing list means you get spam. Contributing to a blog that doesn’t publish emails doesn’t generate spam. Personally, I’m reluctant to contribute to mailing lists for this reason: but I’ll happily comment on blogs.
Except of course the CSS Working Group blog as it currently stands has a teensy problems: there isn’t any way to comment…
I’d like to see the WCAG Working Group do the same sort of thing.
I’m going to phrase this next bit carefully because I’ve had some personal email communication with someone on the WCAG WG, and I do intend to respect that person’s right to have a private conversation remain private. However, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to make a point publicly that I’ve also made privately.
There have been a number of criticisms of the WCAG Working Group (many echoing those of the CSS Working Group), of it’s people and it’s processes, during which time the Working Group have for the most part kept their own counsel. I think they would be better served by telling us their story.
I think that more openness about the WCAG Working Group would be a good thing: not only would it enable the working group to publicly explain why particular decisions were arrived at, it would give the wider community an opportunity to take part in more open discussion with the working group. I think this would increase confidence in the working group — I’m assuming they would demonstrate they were worthy of that confidence, of course — and that would be a good thing, would it not?
In addition, one of the reasons behind the CSS blog is equally pertinent here: the CSS blog people say that they hope anyone with a comment will comment there, as they simply don’t have time to read every single blog posting on the internet on the subject of CSS. Assuming that they manage to provide a mechanism for commenting, this would also apply to accessibility too.
Let’s have an official WCAG blog, and let’s publicly discuss how to make things better.
Hello. I am 
Unfortunately, it is a standard W3C talking point that they “don’t have time” to “read every blog” on whatever topic. That’s why they invented RSS, and *we have no trouble doing it*.
WCAG WG doesn’t *want* to be open. They consider themselves much too open as it is. If you want to know what they’re doing, they expect you to phone in to their conference calls. Then again, they might hang up on you.
Joe, are you saying that you read every blog post that shows up on http://technorati.com/posts/tag/accessibility ? The equivalent list for CSS shows one post every 5 minutes. There is no way I can read all of that and still have time for anything else. If you’ve got some suggestions more practical than “brute force Technorati”, I’d love to hear them, but smugly implying I can and should read every post about CSS isn’t helping at all.