E-Marketing in Minneapolis David Vinge, eMarketing Dashboard : W3C Releases Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Sunday, December 14, 2008

W3C Releases Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

On Dec 12, 2008, W3C announced the publication of WCAG 2.0. Read the online press release and the guidelines.

The following are the key differences between 1.0 and 2.0 guidelines:

Principles: 1.0 has 14 principles at the highest level; 2.0 has only 4 principles at the highest level.
Technologies: 1.0 guidelines are very specific to HTML; 2.0 has a separate technique document that includes: HTML and XHTML, CSS, Server-side Scripting, SMIL, Plain Text, and ARIA techniques.
Priorities: Each guideline in 1.0 is assigned a priority and many of the guidelines are considered priority 2 and 3 guidelines which are “less important” than priority 1 guidelines. Each guideline in 2.0 is considered equally important and to have an equal priority, but each can be implemented to a lesser or greater level:: A (lowest level), AA, and AAA (highest level).

Some of the guidelines in 1.0 are left open to interpretation; 2.0 includes testable success criteria for each guideline. A comparison of 1.0 checkpoints to 2.0 can be found on the WCAG site.

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