If I see one more website claiming to be accessible to a W3C WCAG AAA rating, or one more public sector tender document asking for one, I'm going to scream like a big girly who's just found out that she's won a two week holiday to the Maldives. With Brad Pitt.
If you think your website is, then I'm sorry to tell you - you're almost certainly wrong. And the reason is: that the WCAG authors only made the AAA rating as a joke. Well, I'm pretty sure they did.
I'll start off with some of the checkpoints which are pretty tough, but you could meet (with some effort):
I'm not sure how you can conform to these with any degree of certainty, but for the sake of the argument, I'll assume every piece of your content has been written and edited perfectly.
These are as equally vague as each other. Should you be publishing all your diagrams as SVG rather than GIFs? After all, the SVG markup language exists (3.1 - tick!), and it is an appropriate (3.1 - tick!) - and accessible - alternative to any GIF graphs or diagrams.
And if you're publishing metadata (which you have to, it's another checkpoint), shouldn't you really make it available in RDF? And shouldn't your multimedia be SMIL? Do you have your privacy information in a P3P file (after all, IE6 - the most popular browser - supports it)? If not, I'm not sure you can be certain of your conformance to 11.1
Again, a bit vague, but let's assume that there are three generic types of user: novices, those of average skill, and advanced. So that's at least three different types of search I want to see on your AAA website.
And they must have been rolling around giggling in their little W3C chairs when they came up with this real doozy of a checkpoint:
Even better, the recommended technique is to use Content Negotiation. Yes, Content Negotiation - that wonderful HTTP idea that has been around since the beginning of time, that everybody agrees makes sense, but nobody really uses. In my close group of friends, I have people who are first-language Welsh, Spanish, Japanese and English speakers. So their preference, when visiting your AAA website, is to have the content in their native language.
OK, maybe I'm misinterpreting what these checkpoints mean. But surely the guidelines should have been written in "the clearest and simplest language" with no room for ambiguity? Especially as the guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html) claim to be AAA accessible? (Actually, even without me being awkward about this dodgy argument, I'd claim that 'R&D' towards the top of the document constitutes an acronym, that doesn't have an expansion in the HTML - hence no checkpoint 4.2 compliance. Goes to show how difficult these are to implement consistently.)
Having said all of this, I actually think that these guidelines are one of the most important web publications of the last 10 years. No matter how some accessibility experts may argue, they have provided invaluable guidance and techniques for the millions of users who can't afford user testing. Possibly more importantly, they have also raised the profile of accessibility as a core attribute of the web - it isn't an addition, but something that sits at the heart of what the web is.
And, in the end, whether you technically achieve an A, AA or AAA is irrelevant, as long as you've made every effort to tackle as many of the accessibility stumbling blocks as possible. I just wish that, some of the public sector in particular, would view accessibility as a real-world problem, and not a points-based award system.
Dan Zambonini is the Technical Director of Box UK, a UK-based Internet Development and Consultancy company. An advocate of Semantic Web and XML technologies, he works with XML, XSL, RDF, SVG, P3P, OWL, XHTML, CSS, XForms, and a whole bunch of other acronyms.
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