Following on from my comment on the problems of being too focused on formal accessibility validation, I decided to have a look at some flaws in the most generally accepted guidelines. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 remain the most commonly cited guidelines by which web accessibility is judged – with their A, AA and AAA standards and the adherence badges.
It’s 2007. The WCAG 1.0 were finalised in 1999. They are massively out of date, and stretching to maintain adherence to those guidelines genuinely does place artificial limits on web design. This blog page fails WCAG 1.0 standards for AA on two factors, and fails AAA on a single further factor.
One AA factor I acknowledge, and should probably sort out in terms of the Blogger template and the CSS, and that’s the incorrect nesting of Header tags. But the other AA standard I fail on is using different language for the same URL link – i.e. perhaps I cited one link as Blogger and one as Google’s Blogger but they both pointed at the same URL. I don’t acknowledge that as particularly confusing or a limit to accessibility.
And the AAA factor I fail on is that I don’t seperate adjacent links by more than just whitespace. So for example I’d fail AAA standards simply because the navigation menu is a simple unordered list, where each list item is a hyperlink. The WCAG guidelines justification for this is that text-to-speech software fails to identify such links as seperate. Now that might have been the case in 1999, but technology has moved on a bit since then. I’ve tested sites on text-to-speech software and citing HTML like that as lacking accessibility is, in 2007, inaccurate and misleading.
The point here is not that “hey, this site should be AA or AAA”. The point is that accessibility is one of the most major topics of web design today, and we’re judging it on guidelines that are eight years old. That’s an eternity in web development and technology terms.
Thankfully it’s a problem that hopefully won’t last for much longer. The WCAG 2.0 are in their last call of a working draft, and W3C has slowly started to focus on these rather than the archaic 1.0 guidelines. But frankly, while the W3C has made a significant positive impact on web accessibility, if they’re going to go eight years between updates of their standards again it’s just going to become pointless once more. Remember that next time you’re struggling to adhere to 1.0 guidelines for whatever reason, and be aware that W3C consult with government on regulations such as Section 508. Don’t find yourself trapped by ageing guidelines, and be aware of their limitations both for your own design and for presenting accessibility as a subject to potential clients.