WCAG vs WebAIM WAVE

As a policy, I would try to address all of the errors that come up in WAVE, as they correspond to high-severity issues in other tools. Accessibility monitoring platforms like Level Access’ AMP, or Siteimprove, or Tenon.io assign a severity to each accessibility violation, usually on a 1-10 scale.

Here’s another way of looking at this: in August, Apple was hit with a textbook copy-and-paste accessibility lawsuit (see https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/08/20/mendez_v_apple.pdf). The case lists 17 different “common access barriers”, and proceeds to sue Apple for four of them. If your goal is risk mitigation, then it would be worthwhile to see what companies are being sued for. Hint: missing alternative text and missing form field labels are top of the list.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by claudiolvera.

No automated checker is going to be able to tell you that your site is compliant with WCAG 2.0 at any particular level. If achecker is saying that, then you should probably stop using it; that statement is not something that any automated tool can make.

The tool could tell you that it did not *find* any definite errors, but that’s not the same thing as passing the criteria.

The distinction between error flags and notice flags in WAVE is not a distinction between “must” and “should” – it’s a distinction between “WAVE is confident this is an error” and “WAVE believes this could be an error, and you need to manually review it to know.”

Thank you both for your responses. As noted, I defend these lawsuits and also network with colleagues who do. It would be helpful to have some experts available to review websites for compliance modifications and occasional expert testimony. Joe, would you be interested? Claudio, I’m not sure of your expertise in this area but if you have expertise and interest, please let me know.

You can contact me via my website (https://www.joedolson.com); I provide accessibility consulting, and can certainly help as needed.

Just did. Hope to talk with you soon.

Haven’t heard back so I put in a second message on your website.