When people throw around phrases like ‘DDA compliant’, what do they mean? After a couple of years talking about specific accessibility issues, it’s about time we covered the standards and guidelines that people refer to.
Most .net readers know of the W3C: the source of standards we use every day, such as HTML and CSS. But not so many people know that a significant part of the W3C is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which not only produces accessibility standards (or ‘guidelines’), but also checks other standards for accessibility.
The granddaddy of accessibility standards are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1). These came out in 1999 and have formed the standard list of web accessibility requirements for almost 10 years. While some checkpoints are woefully out of date (such as requiring that forms are pre-filled with a default), the concepts behind them really haven’t changed in that time.
The upcoming WCAG version 2 is essentially rewriting the guidelines to be technology agnostic, allowing for technologies like Flash and scripting more easily. The document sets out ‘success criteria’ for meeting these guidelines, based on how they work rather than the detail of the technology.
Other accessibility standards from the WAI are for authoring tools (such as content management systems) and user agents (for example, browsers and screen readers). These are the other aspects of creating and using websites, and reading about them can help you understand who’s responsible for which aspect. To enable accessibility for Ajax-style interactions, you can use the WAI-ARIA.
The process that W3C guidelines go through is incredibly thorough and when I find research from people looking at specific issues (age related disabilities, for example), their conclusions almost always match the WCAG guidelines. With the W3C’s being the most inclusive and thorough, other accessibility standards are usually based on WCAG.
In the US they have ‘Section 508’ legislation, which is essentially a sub-set of WCAG, and should be applied to any web technology bought by the government there. In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act barely mentions websites and doesn’t refer to the W3C’s guidelines. However, guidance documents issued since do include websites and a case is very likely to refer to the W3C. Still, it’s worth remembering that there’s no such thing as DDA compliant!
For the less technically inclined, the great acronym ‘PAS78’ was a document aimed at helping people procure accessible websites. Since then, the British Standards Institution has set out to transform PAS 78 into the first British standard for web accessibility. The aim is to complement current technical guidelines and provide relevant information, and it’s currently undergoing public consultation. Read Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance (Apress) for more about the legal and standards aspects.
When people throw around phrases like ‘DDA compliant’, what do they mean? After a couple of years talking about specific accessibility issues, it’s about time we covered the standards and guidelines that people refer to.
Most .net readers know of the W3C: the source of standards we use every day, such as HTML and CSS. But not so many people know that a significant part of the W3C is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which not only produces accessibility standards (or ‘guidelines’), but also checks other standards for accessibility. Read More
Every device linked to the Internet needs an IP address to enable it to connect with the rest of the network. IP addresses are therefore critical to the infrastructure of the Internet. Yet, the biggest threat that the Internet faces today is that we’re running out of the current form of IP addresses, IPv4. Very soon, we will see the pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses shrink to less than 10 per cent, and it’s been estimated that the IPv4 pool will be completely depleted by 2011.
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