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Presenter(s)
John M. Slatin
Director, Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin
Email: John_slatin@austin.utexas.edu
Introduction
Publication of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, expected in 2005, will be a significant event for the disability and accessibility communities, and for Web developers, managers, policy-makers, educators, and others.
WCAG 2.0 will be accompanied by a number of documents that provide essential information to assist people in using WCAG 2.0 successfully. These include a group of documents describing techniques for implementing the success criteria defined in WCAG 2.0 (the "Techniques documents"), as well as checklists that can be used to keep track of the requirements that have been met and those that remain to be satisfied. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the Techniques documents expected to be available upon publication of WCAG 2.0, and will then focus on the document entitled "General Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0."
Disclaimers
1. I have participated actively in the work of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group since 2002, and am a co-editor of "General Techniques for WCAG 2.0." However, this paper presents my own personal views and judgments, and does not represent the views of the World Wide Web Consortium or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
2. As I write this, WCAG 2.0 and its associated documents are very much works in progress; the final results may be quite different from what I discuss here. All specific references to or quotations from WcAG 2.0 are based on the most recent Public Working Draft, which was published on 30 July 2004. That draft is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040730/. Readers are invited to consult the Public Working Draft which is current at the time this paper is published. That draft will be available at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.
WCAG 2.0
The aims of WCAG 2.0 are consistent with the aims of its predecessor, WCAG 1.0, which has been adopted as an official standard by a number of nations and as the basis for official standards in other countries, including the United States. But the Web has evolved in many ways since WCAG 1.0 was published in 1999, and WCAG has evolved as well. WCAG 1.0 (1999) assumed HTML as the primary language or technology for producing Web content; accordingly, many of the 14 guidelines and 65 checkpoints deal with specific features of HTML. That assumption no longer holds: many different technologies are now used to produce Web content; those technologies continue to evolve and new ones continue to emerge.
WCAG 2.0 is "technology-agnostic"
The guidelines and success criteria defined in WCAG 2.0 have to be "technology-agnostic" in order to work within this broad and rapidly changing technological landscape. That is, the guidelines and success criteria must be careful to avoid making explicit or implicit assumptions that developers are using a particular technology. And because the guidelines and success criteria are therefore somewhat abstract, the Techniques documents and Checklists play a vital role in helping Web developers and others interpret and implement what is required for conformance to WCAG 2.0. The General Techniques document helps readers understand how the guidelines and success criteria apply to specific types of Web content or in different contexts, and points readers to relevant sections in the technology-specific Techniques documents.
From the abstract to the concrete
While WCAG 2.0 is necessarily abstract, the Techniques documents that deal with specific technologies (HTML, CSS, Scripting, SMIL, etc.) are highly detailed and particular.
For some readers this will pose no difficulty. Take the case of a Web developer with some experience in accessibility who wants to learn how to create HTML data tables that conform to WCAG 2.0. She might go directly to the section about data tables in the document entitled HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (in the Working Draft published on 30 July 2004, that would be section 7) (see http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20040730). But for another developer it might be more difficult to understand the relationship between the success criteria specified in WCAG 2.0 and the specific techniques described in HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0.
So I invite you to imagine a different scenario. A developer reading WCAG 2.0 to learn how it differs from its predecessor might discover, for example, that whereas the 1999 document contains an entire guideline devoted specifically to the topic of HTML tables (Guideline 5 Create tables that transform gracefully: see http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-table-markup), WCAG 2.0 does not mention tables and apparently contains no guideline comparable to WCAG 1.0's Guideline 5.
What WCAG 2.0 does provide is a guideline (1.3) which calls for developers to Ensure that information, structure, and functionality are separable from presentation. Under this guideline are several success criteria (not checkpoints) arranged under three levels (not priorities). The first success criterion under Level 1 reads, "Structures and relationships within the content can be programmatically determined." (Again, this abstract language is necessary in order to cover a broad range of possible technologies.) At this point our developer might notice that nothing has been said about data tables (or forms, or any other specific type of content, for that matter) and wonder, "How does this apply?"
Navigating between WCAG 2.0 and the Techniques documents
From this point in WCAG 2.0 there will likely be links to
(1) Checklists: the developer can learn exactly what she or he must do, depending on the specific content she is creating and the technology or combinations of technologies she may be using; and
(2) General Techniques for Guideline 1.3. This section of General Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 will explain why it is important that user agents, including Web browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers, are able to identify structures and relationships within Web content, including data tables and their components (data cells, header cells, groups of cells, etc.). This portion of the General Techniques document will close with a list of resources, including links to specific items related to tables in the technology-specific Techniques documents, including HTML Techniques, CSS Techniques, and others as appropriate.
Conclusion
I am aware that my description makes it sound as though it will be difficult to find out what must be done in order to conform to WCAG 2.0. But in fact the information can be reached in just a few "clicks": From an initial Overview of WCAG 2.0, the developer may go directly to a list of Techniques documents, and from there to the specific document for the technology in which he is interested: two links. The developer might also choose to go from the Overview directly to the Checklists page: a single click. The route through the actual Guidelines is a bit longer (two clicks: from the Guidelines to the General Techniques, and from the General Techniques to the technology-specific Techniques), but the path will be clearly marked and there will be much useful information along the way.
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