Jedadiah Ashford
2/23/2008
Accessibility Standards WCAG 2
This new standard that is coming out seems to be providing quite the upset. The biggest thing that I could find is just the sheer size. It doesn’t seem to be well written at the moment and its hard to understand. The last draft that came out was over 14,000 words long. This seems to be a whole lot to do just for a minimal amount of people that may view your site. The only reason these standards are important to any of us is because they will eventually be required by law. The Target fiasco which cose target 30 million dollars was brought about because customers could only checkout using a mouse, no other means were provided. These and other cases like this will cement in stone the law of accessibility standards. I do like how the standards would protect the disabled from things like that. But some of the rules we classified by web guru’s as “impossible.” For example, one of the rules was to take a video and make sure every single aspect of the video was written in text, everything from colors, size, noises, everything in the video. I don’t think they should be so specific when setting things up for us to do. It would be more beneficial to all to say, “provide a text equivalent for a video clip.” When these standards are made law then those kinds of guidelines and rules will be very tough to follow. I like the new standards coming out but I think they should be more general rules and not so specific.