The long wait for WCAG 2.0
OUT-LAW Radio, 27/09/2007
We hear that new web accessibility guidelines are on the
way. But is it too late for them?
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello and welcome to Out-Law Radio, the weekly podcast that
keeps you up to date on all the twists and turns in the world of
technology law.
Every week we bring you the latest news and in depth features
that help you to make sense of the ever-changing laws that govern
technology today.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week we delve into the
controversial world of web accessibility and ask: why are we still
waiting for an update to guidelines published in 1999?
But first, the news:
- Sky stake in ITV ruled anti-competitive and
- German watchdog opposes Google DoubleClick purchase
Sky's purchase of 17.9% in ITV was anti-competitive and against
the public interest, the Competition Commission has ruled. It could
force Sky to sell its shares, which are now worth over £200 million
less than when it bought them in 2006.
A competition law expert said that a crucial factor in the
Competition Commission's provisional finding is likely to have been
the control that Sky could have exerted over ITV's future strategy.
Giles Warrington of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law,
said that Sky may have been able to exert a stranglehold on ITV's
future.
"Because Sky could effectively block special resolutions if it
has 25% of votes at a meeting, they would be able to restrict ITV's
access to finance and affect plans for expansion," he said.
The Competition Commission announced its provisional findings
and will produce a full report later this year.
The proposed $3.1 billion merger of search giant Google and
online advertising company DoubleClick would lead to "a massive
violation of data privacy rights", a German privacy watchdog has
warned.
The Data Protection Commissioner of the German state of
Shleswig-Holstein Thilo Weichert has written to Europe's
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes expressing his view that the
merger would allow the combined company unprecedented access to
personal data about users.
Wiechert said that access to the combined databases of the firms
would give the merged company access to highly detailed personal
information. "Such an approach contradicts fundamental data privacy
principles of the European Union," he said.
Google appeared before a Senate hearing in the US last week to
argue that its proposed takeover of DoubleClick would not create an
internet advertising monopoly. A complaint has also been filed with
Kroes by the European Consumers' Organisation (BEUC) over the
deal.
That was this week's Out-Law news.
New media technologies may be changing the way most of us get,
send or use information, but they are not necessarily available to
everyone. People with disabilities are needlessly barred from using
all sorts of technologies. Blind people can read web pages; the
deaf can benefit from podcasts – all it takes is for the developers
to build technology that is accessible to them.
But how do developers do this? How do they know they have done
it right? Well, that's where the World Wide Web Consortium comes
in. In 1999 it published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,
or WCAG, giving precise, detailed technical instruction to
developers.
And then: silence. As the web developed and evolved, boomed and
busted itself through waves of innovation, no new rules emerged
from the WCAG working group.
It was 2006 before another version was mooted, and a draft was
savaged by critics.
Now the WCAG people tell us we could be just months away from a
final version of WCAG 2.
So why did it take so long? Shawn Henry, outreach co-ordinator
for WCAG producers the Web Accessibility Initiative, said that the
delay was caused by the fact that they have to take account of
every single comment made about its guidelines.
Henry: With each working draft we
typically get hundreds of comments. So it is really impossible to
say when it will be done because it depends on how many comments we
get with each time and I expect that another last call working
draft will come out in the coming months. Then how long it
progresses after that really depends on the community. So the
balance of when to say good enough is a tough call, I hope we are
close and I hope that the community realises that and we will see
with this next working draft. I think there is a very real
possibility that this is it and we will be able to move forward
from here.
Magee: When the new version of WCAG does come
out it will faces some problems, not least of which is the critical
mauling that 2006 draft received on publication.
The toughest critic of all was accessibility consultant Joe
Clark, whose essay 'to hell with WCAG 2' was a little short of a
demolition of the new guidelines. Clark stands by his view
still.
Clark: Well, it was a complete disaster.
Because they were going so far around the bend to make things
technology neutral and since they are bad writers in the first
place, you could not understand this crap they come up with. They
invented their own terminology they never even said basic things
like web page, website. Ridiculous onerous requirements that really
had nothing to do with accessibility and yet there were things that
we know that are valuable to accessibility like having good
semantic code and everything that were deemphasised or just not
there at all.
Magee: Henry said that much of the criticism
was misguided.
Henry: Some of the criticism was
misinformed and that was too bad. It mentioned, for example, the
idea about how the size and how big it is and what information is
available. That’s one of the things that we didn’t communicate with
the last call working draft in 2006. I think some people saw all
this information and thought it was all required in fact it is not,
so some of the criticism was due to lack of understanding.
Magee: Clark has little sympathy for the
organisation's position.
Clark: Excuse me? I am an expert, I was on
this committee until they kicked me off it and I still can’t
understand it. It is not our problem that we can’t understand it.
It must be immediately understandable to professional developers.
So, on the one hand they admit that they wrote badly but then they
blame us for not understanding their bad writing. I could be the
only person who is not on the WCAG working group who printed
everything out and read everything twice if. I couldn’t understand
it in reality no one else is going to be able to understand it.
Magee: The obscure language of the draft was
also heavily criticised. There, Henry holds her hands up.
Henry: Absolutely, when the last call came
out some of the criticism particularly about it being difficult to
understand and the jargon and all that, I agree.
Magee: Henry claims that the subsequent draft
fixed that problem. Clark congratulates the WCAG group for
that.
Clark: To their credit and to my great
surprise they left no stone unturned. Every significant criticism
was addressed and many less significant criticisms were addressed.
They actually listened and tried to fix things.
Magee: The massive delay caused by the WCAG
group's seemingly endless consultation programmes may have caused
the guidelines fatal problems. According to Clark, WCAG is no
longer the only game in town, and its next release will have to
compete, not least with section 508 of the US Disabilities Act.
Clark: WCAG will have a more limited
audience than people think. There are completing standards; just
off the top of my head there is the revamping of section 508 regs
in the United States. There is the European standard for
accessibility and there is the Japanese standard that no one ever
talks about. There is the German Standard called BITV which is WCAG
1 in drag and the new BITV will be WCAG 2 in drag. There are
competing standards. If you really must have a standard then the
aphorism remains that true the good thing about them is there is so
many to choose from.
Magee: Even if the WCAG standard faces
competition in the future, Henry believes that it’s made a
huge difference, and that the web world is a more accessible place
now than it was before the standard was invented. She says that
this is true even though most sites do not pass all the WCAG tests
she says that the bar it set is not too high.
Henry: The level of basic awareness is
hugely different from the last ten years. Do they set the bar too
high? Overall I would say no because the bar is people being able
to use the web.
Magee: Clark agrees that the situation has got
better, but he thinks that the engine for future improvement is not
a set of standards or guidelines. He says that much more important
is the fact that flashy new Web 2.0 interactivity demands a better
quality of computer code to work. And better code, he says, makes
for more accessible sites.
Clark: All the cool kids already know
enough about web accessibility that they just automatically make
reasonably or very accessible websites as a matter of course and
they never look at WCAG anything. They never look at any of the
guidelines. We are living really in a post-guideline era. All the
standardistas already know what they have to do and some trivial or
even some significant rewording of what they have to do is not
going to effect them at all because they are never going to crack
those things open. If you want to do these kooky, fun, interactive
websites using scripting of any kind you can’t do that with crappy
code you really need half decent HTML just to put enough scripting
hooks in there to make things work. So, just to make your Web 2.0
application work you have to have reasonably good HTML the
standards are seeping through slowly and we are getting
accessibility as a by product of that.
Magee: That's all we have time for this week,
thanks for listening.
Why not get in touch with Out-Law Radio? Do you know of a
technology law story? We'd love to hear from you on radio@out-law.com.
Make sure you tune in next week; for now, goodbye.
Out-Law Radio was produced and presented by Matthew Magee for
international law firm Pinsent Masons.
