so, the WCAG Samurai is out. Put together by an unknown number of annonymous persons championed by (and who knows, maybe soully) Joe Clark the Samurai is an errata to the Web content accessibility guidelines version 1 bringing them up to date and making them fit for purpose in 2007. the Samurai is not a WCAG version 1.5 but rather a series of corrections and modifications which the author(s) believe will help iron out accessibility issues which continue to be propigated even with implementation of version 1.0. Both independant peer reviews, undertaken by John Sampson-Wild and Alastair Campbell suggest that this is likely to muddy the waters further and that the Samurai might be easier to interpret and implement if it were in the form of a WCAG update rather than list of corrections and modifications and I am enclined to agree. While the current Errata is a valuable point of reference implementation is complex and would be simplified by a WCAG Samurai content accessibility guideline.
More of an issue though is a direct comparison with the re worked WCAG 2.0 working draft. Working as I do in the public sector and setting benchmarks for commercial enterties to work to I have to ask myself which will our stakeholders
- find most palatable,
- be able to work with,
- and which will benefit end users more – if either.
What’s more, can it ever be acceptible for government money to be spent on holding industry accountable to a standard to which we nor they have no opportunity to input, and for which there is in turn no accountability.
difficult questions indeed.
June 8, 2007 at 12:43 pm |
[...] The Web samurai have posted their Errata to the W3Cs web content accessibility guidelines version 2.0 draft. see comments links and reviews from here. [...]
June 8, 2007 at 5:50 pm |
I think you mean “solely.” Anyway, even though WHAT WG went ahead and pretty much did that, we could not, according to the W3C copyright licence, produce a derivative work that incorporated errata. They could make that stick, so we published a corrections document that passes the fair-dealing test. A tad inconvenient.
Now, if the W3C would like to adapt our work for a future WCAG 1.1, well, they could ask. But they’ve specifically ruled that out in the past.
June 9, 2007 at 6:05 am |
One of the peer reviews was completed by me: Gian Sampson-Wild (not John Sampson-Wild)
June 14, 2007 at 10:56 am |
Thanks Joe and Gian for the comments especially those re spelling errors / typos – screenreaders have got a lot to answer for especially re your name Gian.
November 15, 2007 at 11:03 pm |
[...] Green Mel Pedley Joe Dolson It only matter is you care Roger [...]
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April 15, 2009 at 3:49 pm |
The style of writing is quite familiar to me. Did you write guest posts for other bloggers?