[Irl-dean] WCAG 2.0

[Elaine.McGlynn at dcu.ie]

Hi all, 

Guideline 4.1 ("Use technologies according to specification") of the WCAG
2.0 working draft is under a lot of discussion at the moment. There are a
number of arguments for and against whether "validity" should be at Level
1 or Level 2 in the guideline. Details of this discussion can be found here:
 
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2005/06/validity-accessibility.html

My Opinion: 
WCAG 1.0 included a guideline which stated that authors should "Create documents
that validate to published formal grammars". This was a Priority 2 checkpoint.
WCAG 2.0 is designed as an improvement on WCAG 1.0 and should demonstrate
how the Web and its authors have progressed in those few years since the
WCAG 1.0 guidelines were produced. Web authors should be fully aware how
to produce valid HTML websites; even if it means rendering the poor HTML
content produced from some authoring tools to produce valid code. Until more
efficient authoring tools are developed, it is the author's responsibility
to ensure that standards and specifications for HTML code are adhered to.


I believe that if the WCAG 2.0 guideline 4.1 is placed at Level 2, we are
somehow saying that "lazy" coding is accepted. Note that the mission of the
WAI is to support the W3C commitment "to lead the Web to its full potential
[including] promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities."
Assistive technologies rely on "accessible" websites, but why make it more
difficult for them by accepting poor coding practices, which in turn lead
to invalid webpages.  The following argument is taken from the WAI "Validity
and Accessibility" article: 

<quote>
"Last week I gave an example of a complex data table marked up with headers
and id - apparently OK at first sight. But as the values of id attribute
were not unique on the page, the page failed validity test. Screen readers
and self voicing browsers did not forgive this lapse and did not associate
data cells and header cells as expected.
How would one regard this problem? "A little problem" from a validity standpoint?
Accessibility eval tools do not check for validity problems that result in
accessibility  problems. So if one does not validate the page before running
it through an accessibility eval tool, the problem will go undetected. It
is high time that validity be taken more seriously. It is only in authoring
Web content invalid code or syntactically  incorrect code is acceptable.
Other programming languages do not allow even a missing comma or semi colon,
etc. The same standards need to be enforced here now."
Sailesh Panchang
Deque Systems www.deque.com
Reston VA
</quote>

Why leave any room open for errors like the above? I believe that validity
and accessibility go hand in hand. Why compromise when we have the power
now to get it right? Validity should be at Level 1 in WCAG 2.0 guideline
4.1. What do you think?..

Kind regards,
Elaine


Elaine McGlynn
Support-EAM Project,
Electronic Eng. Dept.,
D.C.U.

Email: elaine.mcglynn at dcu.ie
Ph: 0876344144