Saturday, May 10, 2008

BPN 1094 Test drive new web content acessibility guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has announced the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Candidate Recommendation on 30 April. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities, and many elderly users.

This stage is for developers and designers to"test drive" WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that the guidelines can be implemented in Web sites.

Candidate Recommendation (CR) is a major step in the W3C standards development process; it signals that there is broad consensus in the Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content of WCAG 2.0. The W3C Process stages are described in How WAI Develops Accessibility Guidelines through the W3C Process.

The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to "test drive" WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented in Web sites. WAI encourages a broad range of Web sites and Web applications to use WCAG 2.0 at this stage, and share implementation experience. For information on submitting your implementations, see WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Implementation Information. If you plan to provide implementations, please let W3C know your intentions by 23 May 2008. Actual implementations are due by 30 June 2008.

It is important to note that some WCAG 2.0 requirements are at risk; that is, they may not be included if there are not sufficient implementations. Items at risk are listed under “Items at Risk” in http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-WCAG20-20080430/#status_risk.

While the focus of this stage is to collect implementations, the comment form and email address are still available from Instructions for Commenting on WCAG 2.0 Documents.

The different WCAG 2.0 documents that the WCAG Working Group updated with this publication are introduced in Overview of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Documents.

A key tool for using WCAG 2.0 documents, which was previously called the "Quick Reference", is How to Meet WCAG 2.0: A customizable quick reference to WCAG 2.0 requirements...

For more information about the Candidate Recommendation status of WCAG 2.0 and the changes since the last publication, see "Status of this Document" section of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0 is part of a series of accessibility guidelines/standards developed by WAI, which are listed in WAI Guidelines and Techniques .

Related Information: W3C press release

Blog Posting Number: 1094

Tags: accessibility

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