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WCAG 2.0 vs. Section 508

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From: David Ashleydale
Date: Aug 10, 2009 6:05PM

Hi,

My company has been working towards complying with the WCAG 1.0
accessibility guidelines and recently we've decided to "upgrade" to WCAG
2.0. Since we're touching our standards anyway, I thought this might be a
good opportunity for us to throw in the ADA Section 508 guidelines, too. I
realize that there is a lot of overlap between the two standards, but I
thought it might be valuable to pick up the Section 508 items that are not
in WCAG 2.0.

My first question is, do you think this would be valuable, or do you think
it's sufficient to just use WCAG 2.0 and not bother with Section 508? Our
site does not currently provide services to the federal government -- we are
a commercial site. Although, if we ever did provide government services or
if commercial sites are ever explicitly added to Section 508, then it would
be nice to say that we are already in compliance.

My next question is, if we do add support for the Section 508 web
accessibility guidelines to our site's standards, what would be a good way
to deal with the priority levels? It's easy to use the 3 priority levels in
WCAG, but as far as I can tell, everything in Section 508 is of the same
priority level. Should I assume that all of the Section 508 guidelines are
of the highest priority level? Or maybe it would be a good strategy to use
WCAG's priority levels when the two standards are similar, and only assign
the highest priority level to those Section 508 guidelines that are unique.

Thanks for your thoughts,
David Ashleydale