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Re: Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibilityproblems encountered by blind users on the web

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: May 9, 2012 2:48PM

Firstly I recommend reading the article.

What it boils down to is that standards by themselves are not enough for
developers to deduce what constitutes accessibility, since standards can be
interpreted in many different ways, and are often interpreted wrongly. The
findings of the study support this.

It also states that we should have a proactive approach to accessibility
instead of relying on a reactionary approach geared only on fixing problems
that already exist, which causes accessibility to be an afterthought in most
cases.

Quoting from the article

"The results of this study indicate that it is time to move away from the
problem-based paradigm for web accessibility, where our primary goal is to
eliminate problems encountered by users. Taking a lesson from usability
research, web accessibility research must define a much broader set of
design principles, based on user data, that focuses on the use of the web by
people with disabilities - not just on the problems they encounter."

I agree with this, and have been working for years to promote the same idea.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karlen Communications" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "'WebAIM Discussion List'" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Guidelines are only half of the story:
accessibilityproblems encountered by blind users on the web


> One thing I see is that the WCA Guidelines are being used as "standards"
> for
> all types of file formats when we are developing standards specific to
> those
> file formats.
>
> I haven't read the study but in our language we seem to talk about
> guidelines and standards as if they were the same thing.
>
> Hopefully as we develop standards for specific document formats and types
> of
> content they can be incorporated and referred to in the WCA Guidelines as
> specific standards for specific types of content.
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
>