[Irl-dean] AAA Claim?

[brendan spillane]

Hi all,

First off thanks for the replies and any other input is still very
welcome. This is kind of long so for anyone short of time I apologise
and I have attempted to reply to each of you in order.

(Laurence wrote)
>what's the purpose of the AAA claim? If they are a public service body
>then they only need AA for "compliance" reasons.

this particular organisation feel that they should have a website
which is AAA accessible because they have particular disability
interests and are responsible for lobbying for disability rights. They
feel that in order to effectively promote disability rights they must
be seen to go above and beyond what they expect other organisation to
comply with.

I have pointed out to then that the benefit of going from AA to AAA is
not as great as from A to AA

>More important than wearing the badge is whether the site provides a
>genuine usable experience for all  their visitors, something better
>*measured* through user testing rather than *ticking off* the
>guidelines.

I agree totally with this but as I mentioned above in the case where
this organisation advertises for disability rights they need to have
both a good user experience and also the guidelines ticked off where
possible.

>I haven't tried it yet, but have you seen the PDF to HTML converter on
>the Adobe website?
>http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html

It has been a while since I tried it but the last time I checked the
out put leaves a lot to be desired.

(Josh wrote)

>I would venture to say (and this is purely my own opinion) that is may
>even be better to consolidate the good work you and your client have
>done and give the entire site a WCAG 1.0 AA compliant level only.

Noted Josh

>...To be frank if I see a site with AAA all over it I am immediately kinda
>suspicious...

I admit the first thing I do is "View > Source" or "View > Page Source" ;-)

>To clarify, I am not in accord with parts of WCAG 1.0, esp certain
>Priority 3 recommendations. These are specifically, but not limited to:

The use of .png files is one I have particular problems with as well.

(Eoin wrote)
>The AAA badge is not intended as a site-wide indicator of accessibility;
>instead, I believe the recommendation is that you apply it on all pages
>which meet AAA compliance. So it is perfectly legitimate, if not desirable
>practice, to use it whereever on the site it is true, even if other pages are
>completely inaccessible

Up until now I have resisted this option on the website we develop
probably as I saw it as the start of a slippery slope. you might ask
why I am wondering about others opinion now which at the least
indicates that I am thinking of doing it and I suppose my only answer
is that I believe that in this particular instance I see the clients
point that they believe that the content in the newsletters is while
not hugely important it may be a useful resource and certainly hiding
for all but the organisation would be a backwards step.

>However, although you can validly make the claim for the pages at the
>time they are initally launched, how do you know that they will
remain compliant
>in the future? It is very easy for a content maintainer who is not
intimately familiar
>with the WAI guidelines (and even those who are) to add or modify
content on the
>page that breaks the guidelines at any level.

>So unless you plan to freeze the site content, or maintain it
>personally, the AAA claim will probably soon be inaccurate.

We are currently working with another company in developing a CMS and
methods of training so that websites can reach AAA and maintain the
level of accessibility.

I will admit that this is proving difficult and we do regularly have
to check the accessibility of particular websites and put in place
some fixes for the outputted code output by the CMS and further
training in the use of the CMS and writing accessible content. We are
slowly progressing with this and I see the effects best when I am
showing the next client the CMS and pointing out the right way of
doing something.

I won't go into this further but at some stage I might writ up a case
study on it


(Barry wrote)

>That said, I'm a bit confused. Brendan seems to be saying that
>resources available only in PDF and DOC would qualify as meeting
>WCAG 1.0 Double-A, but not Triple-A.  Whereas I would have thought
>these resources straightforwardly violate Checkpoint 11.1 ("Use
>W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a
>task and use the latest versions when supported. [Priority 2]");
>which means that while they *might* conform to WCAG Single-A, they
>surely cannot meet Double-A.

This is possibly a more important issue and toyed with starting a new
thread on it.

I believe (possibly in error) that it is acceptable to claim AA
compliance when a website has information on it in .doc .pdf which are
not replicated in xhtml

when reading the check point 11.1 you reference above I have always
taken this into account when using technologies available on the web
such as flash which are part or all of a website but not for .doc or
.pdf which a website links to.

Am I wrong?


Best,


Brendan