Edit comment LC-644 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-644: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Chris W <chris@chrisw.com>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Resolution status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
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Comment Type: GE
Comment (including rationale for proposed change):

To set the scene, I am your average garden-variety web developer. I am a simple soul, with college education, good English skills and above all, good HTML skills. I spend all day, every day, producing sites - for everything from the local dentist to the multi-million pound nation-wide high street chains.

WCAG 2 has disappointed me.

For a start, I just don\'t understand it. I am not stupid, but I just don\'t understand how it applies to what I build. How can I bear all that in mind when going through the stages of planning/building/testing a site?

It\'s going to take months to combine that into my daily routine and to be honest I cannot see the commercial benefit. Most of the sites I build, I make them WCAG 1 level 2 accessible out of good practice and for good karma. I like it; I enjoy the sense of responsibility I get from it. It sets me apart from the monkeys knocking sites out in the back bedroom.

WCAG 2 is so difficult, why would I bother? My customers do not care! If they do, then they will have to pay me a lot to have a compliant site, as the extra amount of time involved does not come for free.

If WCAG 2 was actually simple - a simple to understand a plain-English check list (i.e. - do you use PDF, see page 3, if not continue to page 4 > checklist) along with highly automated checking system, then we are going to see a lot more developers producing compliant sites. Just dreamâ€¦an internet with more and more compliant web sites. Is that not what we all want?

Proposed Change:; Related issues: 582
(space separated ids); WG Notes: [EDITORZ] Discussed in the 26 April 2007 telecon: Resolution: Accept 582, 590, 644, 664, 689, 884, 1010, 1330, 735, 754 , 843, 651, 658, 1007, 1312, 1370, 857 as proposed http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/04/26-wai-wcag-minutes.html; Resolution: We have reworked the entire document to make it shorter and easier to read. This includes: - Shortening the introduction - Moving much of the discussion out of the guidelines and puttin it in the Understanding WCAG 2.0 document - Shortening the conformance section and moving it after the guidelines - Writing simpler guidelines - Removing as many technical terms (jargon) as possible, replacing them with simpler language or their definitions - Removing the nesting of definitions where we could (i.e. definitions that pointed to other definitions) - Moving information about mapping between WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 to a separate support document (so it can be updated more easily) - Creating a Quick Reference documents that has just the Guidelines, success criteria and the techniques for meeting the success criteria. - Trying to word things in manners that are more understandable to different levels of Web expertise - Adding short names/handles on each success criterion to make them easier to find and compare etc. - Simplifying the conformance section - Using plainer language wherever possible (e.g. â€“ use â€œWeb pageâ€? instead of â€œWeb Unitâ€?) - Eliminating several new or unfamiliar terms. (authored unit, etc.) - Making the whole document much shorter.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)