Accessibility standards have become inaccessible

Just yesterday I posted an article entitled Accessibility takes a step forward. Today I have changed my mind.

For a number of years now we have had WCAG 1.0 which have become known as the accessibility standards. WCAG 1.0 consists of priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines. Many of these guidlines are vague and open to different interpretations.

For those of us who are interested in website accessibility we also still had to deal with the Section 508 regulations.

Then, to add to the confusion, the WCAG Samurai Errata was published on 26 February 2008. This set of guidelines basically discarded the existing priority 3 guidelines and suggested various changes to the priority 1 and 2 guidelines. In my opinion these were the first set of guidelines that actually made sense.

As if there is not already enough confusion the WCAG 2.0 was published as a W3 Candidate Recommendation on 30 April 2008. These guidelines differ quite a lot from anything that has come before. The different priorities are now gone and we now have levels A, AA and AAA. These proposed guidelines are also still very vague and in all honesty some of the guidelines will be very difficult (if not impossible) to implement.

Now where does this leave us, the guys who develop and design websites?

With all this confusion it is possible for one to now have different sites all complying to a different set of standards. I have decided to commit myself to my own set of standards until such a time when we all have a reasonable and proper set of standards to which we can comply. I have done a lot of thinking about this and finally decided that if I base all my present sites as well as any future sites on the same set of standards I could save myself a lot of trouble. I have tried to come up with a set of standards that should ensure that I will not have to make too many changes the day we all have a set of decent standards. The following is the rules according to which I will be developing websites:

I personally feel that good usability and cross-browser capabilities all form part of site accessibility. For this reason my first 3 guidelines are not currently included in the present standards but will be built into my own sites:

All content will be separated from layout.
Only valid (X)HTML markup will be used.
Only valid CSS markup will be used.

All designs will take the following into consideration:

If at all possible only liquid layouts will be used (this is a personal preference). Other options could be considered if they are accompanied by thorough testing.
Special attention to be paid to loading times. No unnecessary images, scripts or anything else for that matter. (Those sidebars that resemble Christmas trees all lit up with decorations is definitely out.)
No fixed font-sizes will be used. All text is to be properly re-sizable in as many browsers as possible.
The primary language used on pages is to be correctly coded and the lang attribute is to be used if any switches between languages is made.
Color contasts used will have to be of an acceptable level (Valid CSS will go a long way towards this).
All the states of the links to be used and coded (link, visited, hover, active and focus).
Text alternatives provided to images that form part of the content. Empty alt attributes for images that are purely decorative.
Purely decorative graphics to be added via CSS only.
No horizontal scrollbars in any resolution from 800 X 600 and above.
“Skip Navigation” links to be visible.
“Return to Top” links where necessary.
Biggest possible area to be provided for links. (Please see Are the accessibility standards cast in stone for more info.)
Do not set tab orders. This should be left to the browser to sort out.

The following could be used if the necessary conditions are met:

Javascript or any other scripts only to be used if really necessary and if the same effect cannot be obtained with HTML (This site is still guilty here. The jury is still out on the decision if the Entrecard script is really necessary or not. I can see that tracking code for analytical purposes would be an exception here).
No frames are to be used but if really necessary iframes could be considered.
No tables are to be used unless used specifically to show tabular data.
No Flash is to be used unless they follow acceptable accessibility guidelines. Over and above this no Flash intros to be used unless there is a way for the user to turn these things off
Audio sounds of any type can only be used if the user can both turn them on and off.
Videos can only be used if they have captioning built in.
No new windows without warning the user of this fact.

The following will not be used under any circumstances:

No PDFs.
No ASCII art.
No animated gifs.
No spacers.
No server-side imagemaps.
No marquees.
No pop-ups.
No justified text or right-aligned menus.
No access keys. (This one goes against the present standards but I have a reason for this. Please see Are the accessibility standards cast in stone for more info.)

If you are aware of anything that I have missed here, I would appreciate a heads-up. These personal standards will be updated as and when necessary.

These standards are meant for use only by myself, the students I train and those who design or develop for me on occassion. The day an acceptable set of accessibility standards is made available I will start using those. In the meantime I feel the guidelines discussed here will allow me to develop fairly accessible sites and not cause me too many problems when an eventual set of standards is announced. The big thing is that all my sites will now follow the same standards.

I would like to end this article off on a personal note. I fail to see why all the accessibility experts out there cannot get their acts together. The longer they procrastinate, the longer those who actually need the standards, have to deal with inaccessible websites.

There are many developers who would love to develop real accessible sites, all we need is some expert guidance so that we all can throw our weight behind the same set of standards. The time for action was YESTERDAY.

These posts might be related: