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Re: WCAG 2.0 vs. Section 508

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From: J. B-Vincent
Date: Aug 10, 2009 6:55PM

See http://www.tomjewett.com/accessibility/508-WCAG2.html for a good discussion of how WCAG 2.0 maps to 508.

--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WCAG 2.0 vs. Section 508
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date: Monday, August 10, 2009, 5:44 PM

On 11/08/2009 01:02, David Ashleydale wrote:
> 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.

Hmm.

I guess that depends on how you are using WCAG 2 Conformance Levels.

The purpose of WCAG 2's Conformance Levels is to allow sites to claim
conformance with subsets of WCAG 2 ("In order to accommodate different
situations that may require or allow greater levels of accessibility
than others"):

http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-conformance-whatis-head

If you are trying to work out what Conformance Level the WCAG Working
Group would have assigned a requirement /if/ it had been included in
WCAG 2.0, I suppose you could try evaluating the requirement with the
same criteria as the Working Group used:

http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-levels-head

But if you want to claim compliance with Section 508, you need to claim
compliance with all of Section 508.

If you failed to comply with a particular 508 requirement, it would make
no difference to your overall compliance whether your company asserted
the requirement was somehow equivalent to WCAG Conformance Levels 1, 2,
3, or beyond those Levels.

So what would be the point of the assertion?

If you must claim conformance with WCAG 2.0, you /must/ at least conform
to Level 1.

Therefore, if you must claim conformance with Section 508, you /must/
conform to all its requirements with the same force as you conform to
Level 1 of WCAG 2.0.

I suppose that's equivalent to saying you would need to "assume that all
of the Section 508 guidelines are of the highest priority level".

Compare the treatment of WCAG 1.0 within Section 508's text:

"The Board interprets paragraphs (a) through (k) of this section as
consistent with the following priority 1 Checkpoints of the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) (May 5, 1999) published by the
Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium …
Paragraphs (l), (m), (n), (o), and (p) of this section are different
from WCAG 1.0. Web pages that conform to WCAG 1.0, level A (i.e., all
priority 1 checkpoints) must also meet paragraphs (l), (m), (n), (o),
and (p) of this section to comply with this section."

http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=content&;ID=12#Web

Does that help?
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis