June 22nd was the final day to provide comments to the Web Accessibility Initiative. Also, June 22nd was the Croatian "Antifascist Struggle Commemoration Day". It may be a bit unfair to draw a comparison between the WAI and Eastern European fascism, but that’s something we’ll just have to wait and see.

The comments on WCAG 2 were fairly universally negative. Challenges against the WAI’s claim to cover accessibility issues for cognitive and learning disabilities and challenges against the sheer incomprehensibility of the document dominated. Additional problems include complaints about the lack of guidance provided on choosing a baseline:

Read more: WCAG 2 Last Call Review Over

Alice Tappart had an article today at WebProNews which was rather interesting. Primarily a tongue-in-cheek appraisal of Why Web Standards Could Be Making You Ill, the article does have serious points.

When it comes right down to it, the article is warning that an obsession about validation and web standards is not as important as ensuring you’ve provided great content. This is true, for the most part. Websites have errors. Undoubtedly, this site has a few errors here and there. I know that I’ve had problems with unescaped copyright symbols lately; but haven’t obsessed about it. The point of her article is that it is very easy to fall into a pattern of constantly verifying the validation of your code, and waste large chunks of time finding every unescaped ampersand rather than writing useful articles, improving your product descriptions, or making a site easier to use.

Read more: Being Obsessive about Web Standards

From 456 Berea Street, Roger Johansson makes note of a EU declaration to "ensure that all public websites are accessible by 2010". This ministerial commitment is in fact quite broad in scope, including commitments to accessibility in the sense of access to an internet connection.

The official press release states:

Many Europeans still get too little benefit from information and communication technologies, and millions are at risk of being left behind. Enabling all Europeans to participate on equal terms in the information society is not only a social necessity – it is a huge economic opportunity for industry.

They also intend to increase the availability of broadband coverage to at least 90% in Europe by 2010. This doesn’t require any change to the current urban infrastructure, but would require the expansion of the rural infrastructure from its current 60% coverage.

This is a powerful commitment, and certainly raises hopes for the future of web accessibility.

After the less-than-positive reaction to the complexity of the WCAG 2.0 working draft released for last call comments on April 27th, the WAI appears to have responded with the release of a quick reference to the success criteria and how to meet them.

One of the main reasons that WCAG 2.0 is so difficult to understand is that it was written with the intention not to require reference to a particular technology. Thus, from a practical standpoint, it is a very difficult document to manage. This quick reference has been written explicitly to provide reference for currently used standard web technologies – CSS, scripting, Multimedia technologies and others. In addition, it allows the ability to disable technology references which have no bearing on your current project – if you aren’t using SMIL, then you can disable this option in the quick reference.

Although the content guidelines themselves still have problems, particularly in reference to cognitive impairments, at least it will now be noticeably easier to make relationships between your practical, day-to-day work with code and the new guidelines for content accessibility.

As an aside, the guidelines for WCAG 2 are in no way binding until WCAG 2 has been moved to full recommendation status. This will likely take quite some time yet – I don’t anticipate that the draft will move to recommendation until at least sometime late in 2007.

I would like to think of David Berlind, the executive editor of ZDNet, as an advocate for web accessibility. He skims the edges of advocating accessibility; giving mouth service to the principles of accessibility and giving some indications that he considers web accessibility of some importance. But, fundamentally, he doesn’t get it and he doesn’t support it.

I referenced an article of his in May, on the subject of the lawsuit against Target Corporation. I only mentioned the article briefly, but today I feel I need to cover it more thoroughly.

Read more: David Berlind on Web Accessibility

Accessible web design is a big subject – so I’m trying to break it down into a group of the constituent parts of a website. I’ve gotten started with an article discussing the infamous task of constructing your main navigation structures, thanks to a stimulating question from Elizabeth Able through Cre8asite Forums.

I intend to continue forward and try and tackle some of the other big quandaries of web design, as well – next up will be accessible content, although I can’t really say when I’ll find the time for that. A very different beast from navigation, I think.

At any rate, the new article is available now – Check it out!

I read an article today by Roger Johansson where he mentioned an interesting situation surrounding the use of high resolution screens. The impact of these newer screens is not something widely considered; but it’s certainly important!

Newer laptop screens are beginning to come available using higher than usual resolution – that is, they have more pixels crammed into a particular area of screen than the normal 72 or 96 DPI. This can have an unfortunate effect for websites, because all of a sudden you’ve got a minuscule interpretation of your elegant page design. Perhaps you can increase the text size, but there’s nothing you can do about the images.

This is not yet a wide-spread issue – but then, accessibility is not about dealing with issues only when they become common. The principle we want to strive for is universal accessibility – and that requires accommodation for high-end products, as well.

Accessibility is very frequently viewed as a means of making something available to those who have disabilities, or for devices with inferior capabilities. But that’s a very inaccurate description – accessibility is about providing equal access to all devices. Practically speaking, however, nobody can actually TEST for all devices. This is why accessibility is so closely tied to web standards.

By adhering to a common set of standards, we can strive to match a template for what will be commonly usable by all user agents. The burden of accessibility is shared between the device designers, user agent creators, and content creators. Only with a commitment to common standards can all information truly be granted equal accessibility.