Origin

Unlike other situations other CS-SIS members may commonly encounter, web accessibility awareness does not usually begin with a memo from a University Disability Resource Center.  Moreover, whether a given set of legal standards are applicable to any given institution are unclear and standards are inconsistently enforced. For more information about the law, refer to Assistive Technology -- Understanding the Law and the section on web accessibility.

The rest of this page will be devoted to voluntary efforts to make web pages accessible.

Identifying the Right Standard

Most readers (to the extent that they have heard of web accessibility at all), have heard of the Section 508 standards.  The Section 508 standards with respect to web pages are essentially a checklist of eleven items meant to address common concerns at the time the regulation was drafted.  They were expressly based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.  Those standards are outdated.  While a web page that meets section 508 standards would be more accessible  than one that does not, the gold standard for accessibility is WCAG 2.0.

Summarizing WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 is organized by principles, guidelines, and Success Criteria.  The principles are general objectives and each of the four principles can be summarized in a single word: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.  Each of the 12 guidelines is a plain English one sentence statement of what needs to be achieved.  The 12 Success Criteria relevant to "A" level conformance and the 26 additional Success Criteria relevant to "AA" level conformance provide highly technical testable criteria by which to measure conformance.

Not all of the criteria are likely to apply to every page.  Some of the criteria can be conformed to with much conscious thought or effort because

[to be continued]