WCAG 2.0 Proposed Recommendation
Friday, November 7th, 2008
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), in case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, has moved from WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation to WCAG 2.0 Proposed Recommendation. As a proposed recommendation the document is really just out there for a final review by the Working Group and general feedback, with the expectation that in December it will complete the laborious publishing process. Therefore we can consider WCAG 2.0 to be complete and ready for use on real world websites.
How is WCAG 2.0 Different?
So what do you, as a web designer need to understand about WCAG 2.0, and how does it differ from the decade old WCAG 1.0 we’ve been discussing forever? First, WCAG 2.0 is to a great extent technology agnostic. One of the problems with WCAG 1.0 was that it tied very much into existing technologies and standards like HTML and as time progressed it became less relevant. Second, WCAG 2.0 is more testable and is organised around design principles for web accessibility. So what used to be guidelines and checkpoints at level 1, 2 and 3 have moved in WCAG 2.0 to principles which have success criteria at level A, AA and AAA.
Additional WCAG 2.0 Resources
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offer an Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents, a WCAG 2.0 FAQ, How to Meet WCAG 2.0, and a Comparison of WCAG 1.0 Checkpoints to WCAG 2.0. Further resources will appear in quick order to help you understand and quickly appreciate new methods of enhancing your website accessibility. Roger Hudson has written Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 for the Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) and Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0. These should provide you enough information to understand WCAG 2.0 and how to meet the accessibility needs of your users.
