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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Sudden Oak Death with Joe Clark
I listened to the first talk from the @media 2007 podcast yesterday, Joe Clark's talk, 'When accessibility is not your problem'.
Joe starts off with a lengthy preamble about WCAG Samurai. Spurred by a controversial article he wrote last year, To Hell with WCAG 2, Joe decided to stop waiting for the WCAG 2 guidelines to be finalised and, together with a few chosen contemporaries, return to making the best of WCAG 1. WCAG Samurai is the result of this project.
The delay in the production of the WCAG 2 guidelines is well documented, WCAG 1 was published in 1999! Another talk I listened to in the last week gave a good job of explaining the current(ish) situation from the working group perspective, Accessibility Wars: A report from the trenches.
The main part of Joe's @media talk looked at four areas in which he felt web content producers are currently wrongly assuming responsibility for accessibility.
All four have come up in recent work I've been involved with, they are:
I listened to the first talk from the @media 2007 podcast yesterday, Joe Clark's talk, 'When accessibility is not your problem'.
Joe starts off with a lengthy preamble about WCAG Samurai. Spurred by a controversial article he wrote last year, To Hell with WCAG 2, Joe decided to stop waiting for the WCAG 2 guidelines to be finalised and, together with a few chosen contemporaries, return to making the best of WCAG 1. WCAG Samurai is the result of this project.
The delay in the production of the WCAG 2 guidelines is well documented, WCAG 1 was published in 1999! Another talk I listened to in the last week gave a good job of explaining the current(ish) situation from the working group perspective, Accessibility Wars: A report from the trenches.
The main part of Joe's @media talk looked at four areas in which he felt web content producers are currently wrongly assuming responsibility for accessibility.
All four have come up in recent work I've been involved with, they are:
- font resizing - he sees this as a browser issue. Fair enough if you're only worried about accessibility compliance but if you're concerned with usability you can't just pass responsibility on to browser designers and users
- headings and links out of context - he says that headings and links shouldn't have to make sense if a tool takes them out of context
- abbreviations - language is a lot more complex than HTML can ever allow for. Loads of great examples
- cognitive disabilities - Joe stresses the fact that the clearest and simplest language should be used appropriate for a site's content. I would add that different language can be appropriate for different sections of the same site.
Labels: accessibility, podcast, website management
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