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Re: Finding WCAG approved sites

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 10, 2003 10:49PM

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Kimberly Chapman wrote:

> My sites all use the following phrase as the ALT text for that icon: "Level
> A conformance icon, W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
> 1.0". That's the recommended ALT at http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1-Conformance .

It might be what they recommend, but it is still worse than pointless.
Even if your page is _about_ accessibility (a very rare special case),
the icon just distracts from the purpose of the page. And the alt text
is a typical example of _describing_ an image, instead of acting as a
_substitute_. If they had starting from asking "what would be put here if
images did not exist?", they would never have invented such a text.
What the image tries to say is very unclear. It could be "This page claims
compliance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 as defined
by the World Wide Web Consortium."

I have yet to see a Web page that actually conforms to WCAG 1.0.
What people _really_ say when they slap the icon over the face of their
visitors is that they have used some automatic checker. But none of the
checkers comes even close to actually checking conformance, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/acctools.html

Regarding the original question, the very search for pages with the
accessibility icon is counter-productive, if the purpose is to make your
own pages more accessible. It's hardly useful even if your real purpose is
to pass the automatic checks so that you could think that you are entitled
into carrying the holy icon. What a page author needs to do that purpose
surely depends on the page content and purpose and especially on the
current version of the page (if existent) or the plans for the page.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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