StandardWeb: a test implementation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)
30/06/2008 18.13.34Two months ago, at the end of April, I read on the WWW Consortium Website (W3C) the announcement about pubblication of Web Content Accessibilty Guidelines 2.0 as Candidate Recommendation and about the expectation of the Working Group to obtain the most number of implementations by developers and webdesigner whitin June 30 2008.
I asked to partecipate to the implementation phase offering my cooperation and after the approval of the working group, I began, in the middle of May, to implement the WCAG 2.0 in my Content Management System (CMS) application.
...and now, here is it!
The StandardWeb application is developed using Microsoft Asp.Net techonology and generates webpages reading contents from a database.
The generated webpages are compliant to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and use the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to separate the content from presentation giving to the end-user the most flexibility to adapte the presentation to his preferences.
Now the pages should be compliant also to the WCAG 2.0. I've just submitted this implementation to the W3C and I'm waiting for the result!
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - WCAG 2.0 are the guidelines to build webpages, and in general every web content, accessible to people with disabilities. I think that every developer or webdesigner should keep in mind these rules not only to help some people but also to be conformant to the standards and to concretize a net of data compliant to as much browsers and technologies as possible in the present and in the future.
It's unbelievable that the 90% of actual websites are not compliant to any standard and some of them are very difficult to be usable!
A website in compliance with standards is helpful also to people that cannot own the latest existent technology or to who use internet with devices different from personal computer, like mobile phones or handhelds. It is helpful to search engine's robots too because the navigation inside compliant website is simpler and faster. This should be an important information to everybody use websites for business and spend a lot of money to obtain a good position in the search engines results page.
The work of W3C is great and needs help from everbody. I hold it in high esteem! So I'm trying to do my work creating a software that helps the building of compliant webpages in a very fast way.
StandardWeb is in beta test release and I will appreciate every comment or suggestion regarding its usability, bugs and general understanding.