Posted by Chris Morris on 06/28/07 15:39

Nick Kew <nick@grimnir.webthing.com> writes:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:13:51 +0100
> Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote:
> > I've just noticed that the WCAG Samurai (which includes Joe Clark)
> > have recently published their errata to the WCAG guidelines
> > http://wcagsamurai.org/
>
> It's a shame they show such deep tunnel-vision, and make leaps
> of illogic from "XYZ is often abused" (or even "XYZ might be
> suboptimal", in the case of serverside imagemaps) to "XYZ is banned".

"Ignore all references to “non-visual displays” or “monochrome
displays.” Web accessibility is about people with disabilities, not
their equipment. A “display” is not a person and does not need
accessibility."

This seems to me to be a *very* narrow view to take, too. To me,
device-independence of content is an important part of web
accessibility even if the goal is solely about people, and even if the
goal is solely about people, it should be about accommodating people's
specific requirements, and those requirements may not be ones
recognised as disabilities.

Example 1: I currently use Firefox and Lynx as my most common two
browsers. If I were to suffer from a motor disability that prevented
me from using a mouse effectively, I'd drop Firefox and keep
Lynx. Despite my vision remaining good, I still benefit very strongly
from good practice with colours in this case, solely because of the
display technology I would use.

Example 2: When I'm coding, I find (and I freely admit this is
probably very unusual) I'm much more efficient using lots of text
consoles and using Alt-n to switch between them, than I am with a
windowed environment (and especially not with the slow switching
between X and console). I therefore use text browsers rather a lot
when coding. I agree, the display is not me, but that doesn't mean
that I don't benefit considerably from sites that are accessible on
that display.

Example 3: If I only have a monochrome printer, and find it easier to
read pages printed (and perhaps expanded) than on screen.

Now, as it happens, in the specific case of colours, if you design it
so that it works for people with the particular disabilities
mentioned, it also works fine for people with different display
technology, so it's not a major problem. On the other hand, it seems
to be a worrying principle to set out.


Also, in their (correct) removal of most of the Priority 3 guidelines,
they seem to have liked the simplicity of getting rid of all of them
(to the level of MUST NOT) over making sense. For example: "13.9
Provide information about document collections..." is now marked with
a terse "Ignore" despite it being a generally good idea if you happen
to have document collections. Given that they say you must not comply
or attempt to comply with any Priority 3 guideline, this means that if
you do have a document collection, you must go out of your way to
avoid giving information about it, or fail to meet WCAG1+S

"13.6 Group related links ..." is ignored on the grounds that "Not all
sites or pages have related links" (which seems an incredible
non-sequitur: not all pages have non-text content, so should 1.1 also
be ignored?) and "[no element with relevant semantics]" (which I'd
have thought <ul> made a reasonable go at in many cases)

Similarly, 9.4's errata "Do not attempt to create your own tab order"
seems to be based on a misunderstanding (albeit a very common one) of
what 9.4 "Create a logical tab order..." meant in the first place. The
common interpretation seems to be 'tabindex', but it could just as
easily refer to placing the elements into the document in an order
that gave a sensible tab order without the need for tabindex -
something that remains fairly important.


I'd also have liked to see some attempt to address the box ticking
nature of "compliance with WCAG1.0" rather than just replacing some of
the boxes.

--
Chris

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