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The new accessibility guidelines were released this month. A few things caught my eye:

It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a
general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy
all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content.

Clearly sense has prevailed and they realise that AAA is often unobtainable without putting severe restrictions on the design and requirements of a website

1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum): The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, except for the following: (Level AA)

• Large Text: Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1;
• Incidental: Text or images of text that are part of an inactive user interface component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have no contrast requirement.
• Logotypes: Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no minimum contrast requirement.

This is sufficiently different, and has been more clearly defined than in version 1 of the guidelines. All designs must therefore be checked for ratios if we are to conform with AA standards.

2.4.5 Multiple Ways: More than one way is available to locate a Web page within a set of Web pages except where the Web Page is the result of, or a step in, a process. (Level AA)

This is very interesting. Certainly I have always stressed the need for good navigation in a website, but this really forces the point home.

There is still no automatic process to determine if a site is accessible as so much depends on human judgment, but it would have been nice to have gone more into the correct testing procedure. Still seems rather vague to me.

What is done well though is the guidelines on how to conform to each point, and the sheer amount of information available.

What I think these guidelines show is that in order to meet them you really need to bring in accessibility from the first design/prototyping stages to ensure that you dont hit major problems further down the line.

Here’s to an accessible 2009!

As an advocate of web standards, it is continually frustrating to have to develop HTML emails in technology which is over 5 years old. The support for CSS within emails had been steadily improving over the last few years. That is until Outlook 2007. But Microsoft are not the only culprits. Indeed Google’s Gmail, and Lotus Notes, both of which have a high amount of users, also provide bad support. These are the findings of a new online campaign, The Email Standards Project whose aim it is to put pressure on companies like Microsoft and Google to improve their support for Email standards and make life easier for developers, reducing the load on servers and improving accessibility, in turn making email production cheaper for marketing companies, and ISPs. Already at 100,000 visits in 18 hours, this project has a lot of support, and I for one am behind it. So spread the word!