Do It Because You Care!

As I will be giving a Right Dynamic presentation on web accessibility at a SHAPE seminar next Tuesday (and again in February), I thought I would put down in pixels some of what I am going to divulge. The plan is to put more up about accessibility in the future, to act as bite-size documents you can read and digest.

I’m going to start with web accessibility guidelines. After all, Right Dynamic did chair the government committee on it and I wrote the resulting guidelines myself!

So, first up is probably the best known: WCAG 1.0. These are produced by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), a body of advisors and consultants led by Tim Berners-Lee (the guy what invented the web in the first place) as part of their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Sorry, but as with everything web, there are a lot of acronyms.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines one point zero (to put English in to the acronym) have been knocking about since the 90s. So, they’re a little dated now, but they are the standard everyone uses. The W3C are working on WCAG 2.0 and hope to publish that set in 2008, although I think we’re most likely looking at next year…

To muddy those waters, there are those who think the W3C weren’t doing enough, or weren’t working fast enough or were simply getting things wrong. So we have WCAG Samurai. These guidelines have been written by some of leading figures in the word of web accessibility.

We helped draft the guidelines for government webmasters on the subject back in 2000 and much of whet we agreed still holds good today. Be aware, though, that these were for government sites, but everything we say can be applied to a private sector web site.

Beyond WCAG, we have PAS78, which was produced by the DRC (disability rights commission, now the Equality and Human Rights Commission) in association with the BSI in 2006. It’s actually quite similar to WCAG 1.0, and you can download a free copy of the PAS 78 guidelines from the EHRC web site.

There are a plethora of other guidelines out there including ISOs 13407 and 18529 as well as the notorious Section 508. I say notorious because it is often pedalled as something all sites MUST adhere to. Actually it is US legislation that forms part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 requiring Federal Agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible. So, not much to do with the UK.

Then you have the RNIB, the RNID and other lobbying bodies that do great work raising the profile of accessibility. Interestingly, this raises the idea of who accessibility is for. For most people, it’s about the blind and partially sighted. But the deaf, those with motor disabilities, colour blindness and dyslexia – to name but a few – need to be considered as well.

That’s why accessibility cannot be a simple fire and forget, one-off checklist. It’s an iterative process. And this is where I’d like to introduce my own acronym:

DIBYC

Don’t make your site accessible because you feel it is a legal obligation and you think you might receive a fine or suffer an embarrassing court case and its resulting negative PR.

Do It Because You Care.

That’s what I believe and how Right Dynamic approaches the subject.