WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Chronicle of Higher Education article "Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" and titling a web page

for

From: Gunderson, Jon R
Date: Dec 13, 2010 3:24PM

The tools really tests best practices for web accessibility that we have developed working with web developers on campus, other universities and state government.

The tool was designed to help web developers understand and validate to design for accessibility.

All of the rules can be mapped back into WCAG 2.0.

I should remind people that both WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 techniques documents are not normative in the W3C sense, they are just suggestions by the working group on how to implement the success criteria of WCAG 2.0.

If you don't consider accessibility at design time, then developers will be looking at anyway to satisfy a requirement without having to change their web pages very much, even if it does not significantly improve accessibility.

The report shows that most pages do not even have the markup for accessibility, forms controls has the most notable deficiencies.

http://webaccessibility.cita.illinois.edu/data/

All guidelines require labeling form controls, including WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0 and even Section 508.

We need accessible design if we really want accessibility to make a difference for most people with disabilities.

Jon