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RE: The Use of Web Accessibility Icons (was: Alt Tags length ...)

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From: julian.rickards@ndm.gov.on.ca
Date: Aug 7, 2003 6:42AM

Kynn wrote:

> At best, I view WCAG 1.0 Triple-AAA buttons as saying, "I care about
> accessibility, but I don't really know enough about what
> Triple-A means
> to realize that my site is probably NOT technically at AAA levels."

Are you suggesting that this quoted sentence should be used as the Alt text
for the WCAG-AAA icon? :-)

I agree with what you are saying regarding the ability for a site or even a
page to be fully accessible and that the icon badge may have no real meaning
but if we are developers and want to promote the fact that we would like to
create accessible websites for our clients, what better method of conveying
our capability or at least our intent than the badges? The prospective
client could follow the link to the validator to see how well we have done.

However, one of the problems I have with the WCAG validator is that there
are so many guideline items that require manual checking, e.g., 14.1 Use the
clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content. I have not
validated any of my pages against the WCAG validator in quite a while but I
suspect that even if all the "automatic" checks pass, some of these manual
checks will still be flagged, not necessarily as an error but just as a
"don't forget to check this". However, if we have the WCAG badge on our site
and a prospective client wants to check our work, they may not realize that
this is not an error. At least with the CSS and (X)HTML validators, it is
much easier for a validator to say that we comply or don't but the WCAG
validator can raise more questions than answer.

What is your take on WCAG 2.0? Will it be easier to implement/validate? Will
the badge of honour be more meaningful?

Jules


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