Our design philosophy - 3
Web Accessibility Initiative
Probably the third area of standards compliance is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which is a little different to HTML and CSS. The WAI develops strategies and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to help authors design websites that can be accessible by people with disabilities.
Much of the advice is relatively easy to implement but some is a little harder and in some cases will go against the grain of what designers might wish to achieve. As recognition of this, partly at least, WAI divides the guidelines into three priority levels:
- Priority 1 (Conformance Level A) defines a basic checklist that a web page must satisfy without which one or more groups of people will find it impossible to access.
- Priority 2 (Conformance Level Double-A) defines a checklist that a web page should satisfy to remove significant barriers to certain groups.
- Priority 3 (Conformance Level Triple-A) defines a checklist that a web page may satisfy to improve access by certain groups.
Unlike HTML and CSS there is no simple test of compliance, and so designing for WAI compliance is a little harder, although as designers begin to incorporate compliant techniques this should become more easier with frequent use. There are some test tools that go some way to finding faults and, once again, I see no reason why all sites cannot be at least Level A compliant. This site is, hopefully, Double-A compliant.
In some countries there are more that commercial reasons to comply with accessibility guidelines. For example, the UK's Disability Discrimination Act, which came into force in 2004, is being interpreted by some, including the Disability Rights Commission as covering accessibility to certain websites. Also the EU is asking European institutes and member state governments to comply to Level AA.
email: stephen@davyanddavy.com.
