I QUIT

As I have documented, WCAG 2 turns its back on other standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium and authorizes tables for layout and nonstandard sites. It is apparent that WCAG Working Group representatives from large corporations are a significant factor in WAI’s decision to remove the requirement for valid HTML that was present, if ignored, in WCAG 1. Products from those companies – IBM, SAP, Oracle – are simply incapable of producing valid HTML . (I have a statement from one of those representatives as follows: “[W]e have known cases where valid code harms accessibility.”)

Hence it seems timely to call for the Web Standards Project to issue an official statement on WCAG 2 and its effect on Web standards. I make that call now.

I further note that the head of the Accessibility Task Force, Matt May, is in a conflict of interest, since he is a former employee of the Web Accessibility Initiative. That may seem to give him a useful in with WAI, but WAI is not so secretive that such an in is really required. His chairing the Task Force may simply indicate that too few people work on or in Web accessibility for anyone to be truly neutral and unaffiliated. While I am recommending no particular action, it would be reassuring to read an official response to WCAG 2 under the byline of the head of Project itself.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.05.25 17:09. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2006/05/25/wasp-wcag2/

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