Are you using a WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Supported Technology to make your Web site?

One thing that you won’t see in the latest draft of WCAG 2.0 is the concept of a baseline.  The community in unison pretty well dismissed the idea as not comprehensible.

It has been replaced with the idea of Accessibility Supported Web Technologies.  We all use different building blocks to put together our Web pages, whether it be HTML, DOM Scripting, AJAX, or Flash.   We need to use Web technologies which are going to support Web accessibility.  Assistive technologies (screen readers, screen magnifiers, braille reader, etc) have to be able to progrogrammitically assess the meaning on content which we’re trying to get across to the user.

So the next question you’d ask is how do you know if a Web Technology supports Accessibility?  The document gives some general guidance but nothing that a layman could easily assess.   I’d assume that all W3C Technologies support Web accessibility.

Shouldn’t the W3C create a list of accessibility supported Web technologies?  I’d think so.  Well they’ve passed that job off on us.  According to the Understanding WCAG 2.0 document, “Anyone can create a publicly documented list of “Web Technologies and their Accessibility Support.”

With so many new Web technologies being created all the time, maybe the W3C doesn’t want to be in the position of holding the official list of what is and what is not accessible.  Maybe the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and their Accessibility Taskforce would be a good keeper of this list.

I just don’t feel comfortable with developers (generally people not that familiar with assistive technologies) judging whether or not a Web technology supports accessibility.  I’d like to see some other organization with more expertise in that area step up.