Un poco de historia sobre WCAG

En The politics of accessibility se cuenta un poco de la historia de WCAG:

The first iteration of WCAG was published in 1999, just eight years after Tim Berners-Lee published the initial draft specification for HTML and just six years after the MOSAIC web browser was first released. Two of WCAG 1.0’s three editors, Wendy Chisholm and Gregg Vanderheiden, were at the Trace R&D Center, at the time affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Before work began on WCAG under the auspices of the W3C, Chisholm and Vanderheiden had already created eight iterations of what they called the Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines. Prior to those guidelines, Vanderheiden had published an article in January 1995 titled “Design of HTML (Mosaic) Pages to Increase their Accessibility to Users with Disabilities Strategies for Today and Tomorrow,” which identifies a series of common accessibility barriers and provides design or code solutions. (Incidentally, some of the problems identified remain things the web struggles with.)

But it’s important to understand that Vanderheiden, Chisholm, and the Trace Center weren’t unique visionaries who stood separate from the world. They were part of a community that, from its earliest days, understood and valued accessibility.

Vanderheiden had attended at the Second International WWW Conference: Mosaic and the Web in beautiful Chicago, Illinois in October 1994 — just a few months before his January 1995 article. So did Paul Fontaine and Mike Paciello, both also speaking on disability and accessibility. At that conference, Tim Berners-Lee identified accessibility as an important focus area as the web continued to grow and develop. Accessibility was very much in the air in the formative stages of the web.

That was a quick-and-dirty history — a too-short narrative that absolutely leaves out a ton of people and details. It’s not the whole story by any measure, and crucially it glosses over the contributions of a large and diverse community that includes a lot of people with disabilities.