WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation
W3C invites developers and designers to take part in trial implementations of the new guidelines for Web accessibility.
Posted 02 May 2008, late evening.
Tagged with accessibility, w3c, wai, wcag, web design, web development, web standards.
Earlier this week, W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative announced that WCAG 2.0 is now a Candidate Recommendation. In the somewhat bureaucratically protracted world of Web Standards, that means it's now just a couple of steps away from officially replacing WCAG 1.0, the penultimate milestone being 'Proposed Recommendation'.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group is excited to announce the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 30 April. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities, and many elderly users.
Publication of WCAG 2.0 as a Candidate Recommendation, a major step in the W3C standards process, signals broad consensus in the WCAG Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content of the document.
"WCAG 2.0 has been developed with extensive community input," said Gregg Vanderheiden, Co-Chair of the WCAG Working Group, and Director of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We've worked very hard, including publishing twelve Working Drafts and addressing more than 3000 comments, in order to ensure that WCAG 2.0 meets the need for an updated international standard with which national and local Web accessibility guidelines can harmonize."
The community is invited to take the guidelines for a spin in real-world projects and submit feedback to the Working Group.
The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to "test drive" WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented in Web sites. WAI encourages a broad range of Web sites and Web applications to use WCAG 2.0 at this stage, and share implementation experience
