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RE: Finding WCAG approved sites

for

From: Mary Martinson
Date: Sep 11, 2003 9:01AM


Yes, I agree with all you said. The *only* purpose of my search for these
sites, as I mentioned earlier, is to point designers to examples of
accessible sites, some of which (we hope) are well-designed. These sites
could be used to promote the idea that accessible sites don't need to be
visually boring (a complaint I often hear). It is easy to show people
inaccessible sites, not so easy to show well-designed sites that are
accessible.

From all the discussion, I see that pointing designers to sites with the
WCAG icon is probably not the way to go. I know there are "good" examples in
some of the accessibility books, but was hoping to have an online list. Any
ideas would be appreciated.
Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: Jukka K. Korpela [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 11:43 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: Finding WCAG approved sites


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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