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Re: A clear EU accessibility law proposed? At what cost?

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Dec 22, 2012 10:22AM

On Dec 22, 2012, at 11:06 AM, Ramón Corominas wrote:

> My understanding is that WCAG 2.0 applies to any document that is
> offered via web.

Why "any document offered via web"?

As I read it, WCAG 2.0 covers "web pages" as normatively defined here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#webpagedef

The Conformance section also make it very clear that "Conformance is defined only for web pages."

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#conformance-claims

So far as I can tell, WCAG 2.0 intends to cover content that's delivered to the user within a browser. I guess the interesting question is: does WCAG 2.0 cover content that doesn't need a browser?

> If not, it would be trivial to force PDF files to
> always download (for example, with an HTTP header "content-disposition:
> attachment") and thus bypass the need for accessibility.


That's an interesting case. HTTP is still the "protocol of delivery," of course, so purists might argue that real evasion of WCAG 2.0 would require use of an FTP server. ;-)

Duff.