WCAG 2.0 level AA Compliance

What I am really trying to say is that accessibility is a worthy endeavor but how a project gets put together from an economic point of view and checked from a legal standpoint is where any robust set of standards begins. Today, putting a small business web site together may be a few hundred dollars but if you drive up the cost to several thousand and there is no automated checking which is 100% reliable and legally accepted, then WCAG 2.0 is a recipe for chaos.

Hi @frenchomatic,

Thank you for your feedback.

I agree with you that a WCAG 2 AA valid site is very hard, but I know quite a lot of sites that validate well.

A few questions:
What was the genesis accessibility demo site you tested?
was that genesis-accessible.org?

Did you analyse if the errors make sense? Because a colour contrast fail on screen-reader-text and background is not really an issue.

Kind regards,
Rian Rietveld

I wish to be really clear because the subject can become emotive. I am fully in favor of developing standards and indeed providing tools and services which make life easier for people with disabilities. For example, a council office without a ramp or lift for wheel chairs is a disgrace. However, there has to be reason when law or standards start applying to graphic design or what many consider is art. We would not tell Picasso that he should paint like Monet or that he needed to use a different color palette.

Validate well in legal terms is not the same as conforms to the law. That is the nub of the whole issue. I have all my sites with 0 known problems, O likely problems but multiple potential problems.

I have found sites that validate up to a point but those without hundreds of potential problems (using an autochecker) or ones that would come anywhere close to satisfying most of my types of client, are far and few between. The issue I wish to highlight is two fold:

1. Legal battles should WCAG 2.0 and section 508 become a matter of law for web sites in the U.S. At present I just can’t see small design agencies or independent designers taking the risk of saying a web site conforms – albeit unless it is very basic and using a bog standard theme. Basically, many of the marketing type graphics will have to be removed and web sites will start to look bland and very much the same. That reduces a key business imperative which is differentiation. Nice features like using text on parallax images will become a nightmare to validate and contentious as to whether it is decoration or not.

2. Cost – whilst automatic checkers can give a good idea of the known and likely problems, even potential problems; the idea that a small design agency has access to a human audit of people with disabilities or a client wishes to pay for a human audit is of real concern. W3C must be bonkers. Whenever there is a human audit of anything it generates points of argument that can be exploited by lawyers.

Yes – https://genesis-accessible.org

This site may end up validating with some further work but frankly- it is minimalism for blogging. Some love it and some think it is a boring design. It is not going to fit the brief of say a dentist in the United States or similar type client.

I would be really interested to see some good top notch web sites which are accessible WCAG 2.0 level AA at least equivalent to what prevails today in the wild. Ones that pass 0 known, 0 likely and 0 potential. In other words they conform and are likely to considered under the law as compliant.

Could you please give some examples?

For me WCAG 2.0 is ill thought out and focusses only on utility – the art is gone and the web will be poorer for it. One person with a disability says they can comprehend and fully see the site and another with the same disability says they can’t. It doesn’t seem well thought out.

As a person with no accessibility problems, I look at some web sites and I can’t make head or tail of them. However, they simply don’t get my time or money.

@frenchomatic,

While you clearly feel passionate about the points that you’ve raised, I don’t see how these directly relate to the code in this plugin.

May I kindly suggest that you write your general WCAG observations and thoughts in a blog post on your own site? It would be a more appropriate location than this support topic.

Sure – please feel free to delete my posts. I will start up a new topic. It does however impact the plugin in the sense that conformity could become a major issue.