W3C accessibility group released WCAG 2.0 Working Draft, the last call for reviewers to send their comments and suggestions on different issues for the new standard. The latest recommendation WCAG 1.0 was published on May 1999, and I think the 2.0 recommendation will be ready by end 2008 since there should be first a Candidate Recommendation then Proposed Recommendation before make it final.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of issues and recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This document contains principles, guidelines, and success criteria that define and explain the requirements for making Web-based information and applications accessible. "Accessible" means usable to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also make your Web content more accessible to the vast majority of users, including older users. It will also enable people to access Web content using many different devices - including a wide variety of assistive technologies.

Posted by Hatem at 8:08 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Truwex Online 2.0 is an excellent accessibility validation tool, by Erigami LTD, which aims to create a very complete report on Section 508 and WCAG Accessibility, Privacy, and website Quality. The tool is very easy to use, by simply entering URL it provide you a set of tabs : Properties, Issues, Map, Inventory, and profile. Best of all is the map view, which show you a list of issues found on the sidebar and when you click on every issue it will be highlighted on the website. Very useful to view and understand better the different accessibility problem in any website. More than accessibility, Truwex Online can help to detect privacy issues, while I don't know why external links are considered in privacy. I think it will be annoying if we alert user every time he want to click and leave the website, thought it is for what links are useful for.

Posted by Hatem at 3:13 PM to Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Accessify is an excellent initiative providing Tools, wizards, articles and tutorials on Web Accessibility for the conscientious web developer. the WAI lack to such initiative to help developers adopt accessibility standards and sometimes small tips and good practice can make a website accessible without lot of work. I love the collection of accessibility tools and wizards, pretty simple and useful. You can subscribe to their RSS feeds for more accessibility news in your reader.

Posted by Hatem at 6:30 AM to Tools | Tutorials | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was reading on Peter-Paul Koch's blog about the latest Dutch accessibility Law, an excellent initiative I find from Dutch government to adopt web standards in Government websites and will be certainly adopted by some companies also. I worked with general recommendation before from Government asking for example a certain number of pages, a general layout of the website, but always keeping the choice for developers to choose the best technology to realize it. I find it really interesting here that the recommendations focus on web standards and accessibility. The new law require that Government websites use :

• valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0
• CSS and semantic HTML and separation of structure and presentation
• progressive enhancement
• the W3C DOM (instead of the old Microsoft document.all)
• meaningful values of class and id
• meaningful alt attributes on all images

I don't know if there is a translation somewhere of the document, because it's difficult to understand in details the different points that the new law introduce and how it treat them. An excellent experience that you should read about if you are interested into web accessibility and standards adoption by Government.

Posted by Hatem at 6:37 AM to Case Studies | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to this new audit of the United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs commissioned Nomensa on determining how accessible the Internet is for persons with disabilities, only three websites achieved Single A accessibility over 100 homepages evaluated during the audit. In the audit a website was chosen to represent the sectors (Travel, Finance, Media, Politics, and Retail) of the 20 countries, forming a matrix of 100 websites. The homepage of each website was measured against the globally recognised benchmark for web accessibility: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). The web is far from being accessible.

The performance across different sectors was varied, with central government, retail and banking offering the strongest (or joint strongest) accessibility performance across all countries.

Levels of web accessibility across the 20 countries were lower than anticipated, given the presence of disability legislation in some countries and the fact that the WCAG have been in existence for over half a decade. Apart from the three sites that achieved Single-A accessibility, there is a global failure to provide the most basic level of web accessibility for people with disabilities.

Posted by Hatem at 10:12 AM to Case Studies | Permalink | Comments (0)

456 Berea Street and the Standard Guy have a very interesting post about the usability of accessibility evaluation tools. In fact accessibility tools and methods are very complicated something that doesn't encourage developers and designers to use it very frequently. In addition to the fact that most accessibility checking points can't be done via automated methods, checking one by one the different points is really a hard and difficult task and could be source of errors.

Accessibility has as much to do with usability than being purely technically correct. The site needs to have clear navigation, the ability to skip content areas, offer alternative layouts and be written in an easily understood style by the anticipated audience. Can an expensive evaluation tool be justified and are site-wide checks using such a tool actually required (rather than just for a “feel good” factor of control over the situation) post-production?

The point is that accessibility isn't the very important issue for many developer and designer, while it should be integrated in the core of website development especially for e-government websites and public services. And since accessibility is still "useless" only for a small part of internet users, people don't worry too much about the different checkpoints, let's say if HTML valid, color are visible enough, the website might be considered as accessible at a certain level.

Such issue will be important when all accessibility checkpoints could be automated and also the fix for the different detected issues. When you have 70 accessibility problem to fix in a page, better to be prompted for possible solution and directly correct the problem. Otherwise we'll be back to the usability issue of accessibility evaluation tools.

Posted by Hatem at 7:30 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (1)