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Local legislation or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ?

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From: AutoMagicMike
Date: May 18, 2013 10:20AM

Hi everyone,

I'm a little confused about the differences between accessibility
legislation
in different countries around the globe. Any clarification would be really
helpful.

I regularly have to develop for UK, Europe, US and other countries.

I have always been told to completely "ignore" local legislation for any
individual country as it is too time consuming and time can be better spend
else where.

I was told to focus on "usability", the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines (WCAG2) and clean valid HTML, in that order of importance.

Usability ...

I've been told that "usability" is the primary objective of any website,
and that
includes usability for people with disabilities, which is why all our
developers
should test their pages with a screen reader (e.g. NonVisual Desktop Access
NVDA).
Ultimately there is no substitute for usability testing - "Don’t make me
think!"

Many web developers, (project leaders and product managers), cannot use a
screen reader.
The skill should not be beyond most able bodied web developers and business
users who are often involved in web work.
Using a screen reader regularly, like validating regularly, improves the
quality of your work.
Use of screen readers also puts an end to those endless, is "x" better
than "y" "discussions".

When your website sounds wrong - that's when to redesigning and turn to the
WCAG and
Roger Hudson's excellent work on accessible forms.
Of course for the less experienced WCAG also provides training and a
framework to get you started writing accessible HTML.

So, once developers have performed the following 3 tasks they should be
ready to go:
1) Validated HTML
2) Checked against an accessibility checker.
e.g. The Web Accessibility Evaluation tool - WAVE?
3) Performed usability tests in a screen reader.

These two questions often come up:
1) What if we have missed a rule?
2) What if it doesn't work on another screen reader or device?

These questions are usually answered along the lines of one of the
following five statements:

1) If you have created clean, valid HTML, which is WCAG web application
compliant
it "should" work on all devices including: Braille displays, pointing
devices and
and magnifiers.

2) You only break the law if someone complains and, you are in breach of
WCAG.
If someone complains - you didn't do your usability testing properly :-)
Complaints are "gifts" from loyal customers - treat them as such.

3) Fines are not "instant", you have a “reasonable” time to engage
with the customer and provide a suitable fix.
Engaging with customers to find out exactly what they want is a good
thing.
This is called "feedback" and it helps create a better service and
increases
customer loyalty.

Developers can't test for all types of users (Novice to Advance) on all
types of devices.
While professional developers do their best, they need to focus on clean
valid HTML
and rely on feed back and comments from users to make our websites better.

4) Companies get fined when they break the guidelines and then refuse to
fix the problem.
- So engage with your customer, and fix the problem!

5) Finally, when companies are taken to court the lawyers focus on
WCAG and W3C guidelines rather than local legislation.
So providing you web offering meets WCAG you should be fine.

In summing up my three questions are:

1) Is this sound advice?
2) If so are there any benefits to country's coming up with their own
slightly different set of guide lines?
3) Can anyone think of an example where following WCAG2 might still lead to
prosecution under local legislation?


Thanks

Mike