Note that this was written in reply to a post in the Chronicle of Higher Education by George Williams. Reading that and the first comment might provide more contextā¦
…
WCAG is probably the best standard around for how to make your content “universally” accessible to more people with disabilities, but I would back up suggestions to look at tutorials – better to pick at least two. In particular there are things people do that experts would not says violates the requirements of WCAG, but that cause accessibility problems.
Besides, WCAG isn’t in the list of things I think of as easy to read. Even with knowledge and goodwill.
Today’s example of problems that people recognise as causing accessibility issues, but can’t decide whether WCAG has been violated, are invisible buttons, which people who rely on keyboard or voice navigation can’t see or can’t understand. This example comes up a lot, but there are various others.
There is a common focus on accessibility for screenreader users. Which is of course important, but only a small subset of people likely to meet accessibility barriers. People with *low* vision are far more common – and WCAG 2.0 should be evolved (but W3C is currently suggesting otherwise š ) because it doesn’t do a good job of explaining requirements for them.
There are a couple of good places to talk about this – WebAIM’s discussion list and the W3C WAI Interest Group are two mailing lists where a lot of people with serious expertise hang out. You’re not going to find someone there to check your work for free, but you will find people to be very generous with their knowledge if you’re trying to clear up doubts.
I have a lot of respect for the expertise and common sense of Dey Alexander, and the people at WebAIM, even though we occasionally disagree. I would also rate my friends at the Paciello Group and Deque as generally smart and on the right track – again although (or perhaps because) we don’t always agree on all details.
Following these communities a bit you’ll also learn where some of the interesting issues are – accessibility is by no means a completely solved problem, so there are things that are pretty clear, areas of very blue-sky research, and everything in between.
But it is a lot of fun. And done right, it’s pretty valuable to a lot of people.
