WCAG 2.0 - Start at ‘The B of the Bang’

On 30 April, ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0′ (WCAG 2.0) was published as a Candidate Recommendation, confirming that the W3C was happy that it had addressed all substantive issues and that the document was ready for trial.

Following nearly nine years of effort to officially update the original WCAG document published way back in May 1999, it’s finally time for developers and designers to begin implementing some of the key improvements in these latest guidelines and to grab an early lead over any less engaged rivals. WCAG 2.0 is expected to go live by the end of 2008, but for forward-thinking testers, it’s vital to get ahead of the pack by building the latest practices into new projects today.

WCAG 1.0 had become horrendously out of date, including misleading, irrelevant and obsolete guidelines that had become counterproductive, especially for developers and designers new to the concept of accessibility. This new Candidate Recommendation is affirmation of broad consensus for change and sufficient encouragement even at this stage for people like me to start using the latest recommendations to make sites more accessible rather than put any further effort into the older guidelines.

Officially, of course, until WCAG 2.0 advances to W3C Recommendation, the current and referenceable document remains WCAG 1.0, and a certain degree of backwards compatibility means there is no need to ignore the older guidelines in their entirety. But WCAG 2.0 certainly sees some major shifts in priority, heralding the removal of a number of obsolete considerations and enforcing the concept of technology agnosticism. It applies all guidelines equally regardless of whether development and design is in, for example, HTML, Flash, XML, embedded multimedia or other environments.

To ensure you gain the earliest possible advantage over competing developers and design agencies, I would recommend embracing at least the following three key WCAG 2.0 enhancements for current and new projects:

• Audio Control - If any audio or audible multimedia plays automatically for more than three seconds when a web page loads, mechanisms must now be provided that enable site visitors to pause, stop or turn down the sound. This not only prevents interference with screen reading devices, it also puts the user back in control
• Focus Visible - Keyboard focus indicators must be visible by default. Active links or buttons must be obvious whether they are in HTML, Flash, embedded multimedia or other interface styles
• Error Identification and Suggestion - If an input error can be automatically detected, then it must be described to the user in text. If suggestions for correcting the error are known, these should be provided to the user too, unless site security would somehow be jeopardised. Users should be given the opportunity to review errors in confirm and rectify screens

There are a number of ways in which we can get started as testers of WCAG 2.0, with plenty of useful supporting information available. Documents are far more intuitive for this latest publication, and include tables mapping comparisons to WCAG 1.0 by numerical order or priority of applicability. There are also useful lists of new stuff at the start of most supporting documents. You can even create customised quick reference pages relevant to the websites and technologies you are working with.