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Re: 508 compliant checkbox form controls

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From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Aug 2, 2011 1:15PM

My opinion regarding some of the comments below about 508 and WCAG is
that while WCAG 2.0 contains additional detailed requirements, for the
most part, they are refinements, and alternatives which fall under the
original WCAG 1.0 guidance, and the associated Section 508 standards
existing today. For example, for nontext alternatives, WCAG has nine
items broken down--this is nice guidance, but really does not change the
overall requirement, but does make reading a lot longer process. Such
guidance was developed as a natural response to questions and answers
practitioners have encountered over time, but ITS kind of like a
frequently asked question section rather than a more terse standard.
I'm not knocking WCAG 2.0, but taken along with the sufficient
techniques, it is a steep learning curve. I don't believe there are
many sites which will become noncompliant when they are reassessed for
compliance with WCAG 2.0 vs. old 508 standards, at least for the
refinements of existing standards, but such things as delineation of
natural language will cause sites to do some remediation work. In
addition, I foresee a lot of remediation work for some sites to address
unfocused error messages, and a huge set of work to address document
content.