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WCAG 2.0 Sources

Page contents

The XML sources listed here have been forked to GitHub. The contents below describes the files, but please look on GitHub for the current versions of the files.

This is the location for XML sources for WCAG 2.0 and related documents. This page describes the method used to create the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the various Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines documents.

This page is provided as an aid to those who are working on parts of the documents as editors, or translators, or are interested in doing so.

Introduction to the XML format

The WCAG 2.0 XML format is based on XMLSpec. This format has been extended to meet the particular structure of WCAG 2.0 materials. For the most part, elements and attributes have the meanings as defined for XMLSpec. Role attributes are used for WCAG-specific refinements of many XMLSpec elements.

For techniques, the technique element and many of the elements in its content model provide the overall structure of the technique and relationships amongst techniques and WCAG 2.0 requirements. XMLSpec elements are used for body text within that structure.

XSL Transformations

WCAG 2.0 materials are published to HTML and other formats using XSLT. The stylesheet is taken from a version provided to support XMLSpec, but via a local copy which is then extended by import into other stylesheets. Separate stylesheets are provided for WCAG 2.0, Understanding WCAG 2.0, and WCAG 2.0 Techniques.

Running the transformations

Because of the complex set of source files, it is best to use a build script to generate WCAG 2.0. We provide a build.xml driver file for Apache Ant, as well as a build.properties file that contains most of the settings that should be changed from system to system or for different build requirements. The build file assumes it is placed in the parent directory of this sources directory.

To get started generating WCAG 2.0 using the ant build process, change to the parent directory of sources and type "ant -projecthelp". This produces a list of available build targets, which are build scripts that can be invoked. For example, to generate the HTML version of the guidelines, type "ant guidelines".

Note it may be necessary to modify some of the values in build.properties. The "description" attribute of each property describes how it is used. For simple builds, only the "pubdate" property may need to be updated, to control what folder name is used to contain the generated result.

Files available

Content files

XSLT files

Miscellaneous files

There are additional resources in the misc directory.