The World Wide Web Consortium has released its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 specification, which describes stable principles for accessible design, such as the need to provide equivalent alternatives for audio and visual information. Each guideline has checkpoints explaining his purpose. For instance, it’s important to provide images with alternate text so that information remains available to those who cannot see images, while captions for audio files ensure access for users who cannot hear audio.
The guidelines have been designed with forward compatibility in mind. Sites should also degrade gracefully when confronted with legacy browsers. A parallel Techniques document will be regularly updated withy specifics on how to implement checkpoints. The Consortium now wants to encourage content providers to improve access to their information by sticking to the spec. It has always been difficult to know, when making a site more accessible, which changes are critical, said W3C director Tim Berners-Lee. These guidelines answer that question and set common expectations so that providers of web sites and users can be much more strategic. The bar has been set, and technologically it is not a very high bar. Now it’s over to the webmasters of the world.
