WCAG 2.2 First Working Draft released

Plus notification of future v3.0

[iamlost]

Not that very many webdevs pay more than lip service to accessibility...

However, for those few that do...

W3C has released Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 [w3.org] First Public Working Draft 27-February-2020.

Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities.

In my quick ‘first look’ it appears that 2.2 is a limited dot release consisting of

...adding new success criteria, definitions to support them, and guidelines to organize the additions.

There is also notification that a major version release is being worked towards:

In parallel with WCAG 2.2, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is developing another major version of accessibility guidelines.

The result of this work is expected to be a more substantial restructuring of web accessibility guidance than would be realistic for dot-releases of WCAG 2.

The work follows a research-focused, user-centered design methodology to produce the most effective and flexible outcome, including the roles of content authoring, user agent support, and authoring tool support.

This is a multi-year effort, so WCAG 2.2 is needed as an interim measure to provide updated web accessibility guidance to reflect changes on the web since the publication of WCAG 2.0. The Working Group might also develop additional interim versions, continuing with WCAG 2.2, on a similar short timeline to provide additional support while the major version is completed.

[lammert]

Thanks for the heads-up. About fifteen years ago accessibility was one of the criteria I used when designing websites. But currently, it is more about beautiful and fast, than about accessible for a large audience. I will read the guidelines to see how far I drifted away from my design efforts at the beginning of this century and if it is possible to add some of the recommendations to my sites without too much effort.

[iamlost]

Fortunately, with a little thought and prioritising with target audiences in mind it is possible to metaphorically have ones cake and eat it too in regards to fast, attractive, retentive, accessible, usable, converting, etc.

In a very real sense designing for mobile is accessible design; designing with other than default cultural/mental/social/physical settings is just doing ‘friendly’ for people rather than devices.

My threshold has been AA level where applicable with AAA if reasonably possible but I don’t sweat it. I do know that one of the major WoM recommendation/testimonial points on social media mentions boils down to being more accessible than competitors.