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Instructions for WCAG 2.0 CR Implementers

Page Contents

Introduction

WCAG 2.0 has entered the Candidate Recommendation (CR) stage of development. At this stage, the Working Group needs to collect information about implementation experience. It is important to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented before the W3C makes it a formal standard.

Please see WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Implementation Information, which introduces the broad range of Web content that we need, and the steps for gathering the required implementation experience.

Registering your intent

We request that potential WCAG 2 implementers complete the implementation information form. This is important so we can select a core set of implementations that will give us maximum coverage of our exit criteria. This form collects information about your site, the technologies you plan to use, details about the planned WCAG conformance level, and the availability of the completed implementation for the publicly visible Implementation Report.

Please note that completing this form does not guarantee that your site will be used in the Implementation Report. Even if we don't select your project in the first round, we encourage you to work toward WCAG 2.0, and we may have some flexibility for implementations that we need to complete our requirements.

Preparing the Web site

As you work on your Web site, refer to Understanding WCAG 2.0 for help in interpreting the success criteria. Note the "sufficient techniques" (expanded in Techniques for WCAG 2.0) which explain how to satisfy each success criterion. You do not have to follow these techniques, but you do need to follow techniques that you believe to be sufficient to meet the success criteria. If you have used techniques that are not listed, please also consider submitting them for consideration by the WG using the Techniques submission form. Please keep track of the techniques you use, as we will ask for information about them when you submit your final implementation. Some success criteria may not be applicable to your site, in which case they are considered "satisfied" because potential failure conditions are not triggered.

When you choose technologies to use on your site, you will have to consider the accessibility support of those technologies. Please read about Accessibility Supported in Understanding WCAG 2.0 for information about this. You should choose technologies for your implementation that are accessibility supported. One important mechanism to determine accessibility support is to test in various user agents, including assistive technologies. We ask for information about user agents you use to test in the implementation information form.

While you work on your implementation, feel free to send questions about the process of developing your implementation to team-wcag2-implementations@w3.org. If you have have not posted to a W3C list before you will be asked to give an "archive approval" in order for the message to be delivered; this is a spam protection measure. Although the message is archived, which facilitates our ability to discuss and respond, the archive is not publicly visible.

Submitting an implementation

When your implementation is ready, please send a reference to the site. To get this recorded properly in our database, we prefer that you do this via an implementation experience form. This is a long form but will help us to validate the implementation. As much information as you can provide about the techniques you used to conform to WCAG 2.0 will help us to evaluate the implementation efficiently. You can also provide information about the process of implementing WCAG 2.0, which will be valuable feedback.

An implementation may be submitted either as a pointer to a site, or as a packaged set of files. A pointer to a site is preferred. Please be clear about the set of Web pages that comprises the submitted implementation. The site must be publicly available and must be able to be hosted for as long as the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation period lasts.

If these conditions are not possible, let us know and we will contact you about possibly hosting the content on the W3C site. You can upload the package of files when you complete the implementation experience form.