WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Chronicle of Higher Education article"Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" Chronicle Articleand form control labeling

for

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Dec 16, 2010 12:51PM

In my opinion inconsistency in the IT accessibility community as a whole
is a major contributor to the slow, and inconsistent progress we see as
a whole. Identifying a common set of consistently applied requirements
is critical for success. When there is no right answer, everything is
OK, and from experience most of us probably would agree this is not the
best way to achieve accessibility across the board.

WCAG 2.0 has a great amount of valuable standards that can be applied in
consistent fashion. If something is left out of WCAG 2.0 it's not for
lack of asking on the group's part. I think there is significant room
for improvement in consistently providing "how to" information for
various platforms. The lack of centrally located, consistently
developed, and complete how to guidance to meet the WCAG 2.0 standards
for the wide range of platforms in use today leads to inconsistent
efforts by developers. For example, recently the VA released a very
comprehensive course on creation of accessible flash--something that has
been sorely needed in that development community for some time now.
Kudos to the VA folks.

Finally, personally I believe periodic accessibility reporting with
consistently applied metrics would be an enormous value to all
stakeholders, but needs to be designed to provide those who make
decisions about such Web content the ability to understand their
results, and use the metrics to direct change.