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.
The 8 series of website accessibility guidelines is the final set of unified guidelines prepared by the Trace Center. The Web Access Initiative (WAI) of the World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C) has been launched, and the development of HTML guidelines is being transferred to that body. The Trace Center will be continuing to work with and as a part of the WAI. As a result, the Trace Center will no longer be developing or maintaining this Unified Website Accessibility Guideline series. Readers are referred to the W3C site (http://www.w3.org/wai) for the latest version of the guidelines.
Hoy 3 de diciembre se celebra el Día Internacional de las Personas con Discapacidad:
El Día Internacional de las Personas con Discapacidad fue declarado en 1992 por la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas mediante la resolución 47/3. El objetivo es promover los derechos y el bienestar de las personas con discapacidades en todos los ámbitos de la sociedad y el desarrollo, así como concienciar sobre su situación en todos los aspectos de la vida política, social, económica y cultural.
En el marco del Seminario sobre Discapacidades en la Educación Media Superior, organizado por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, el día 27/11/2024 impartí la conferencia "¿Cómo un dispositivo móvil puede ayudar a nuestros estudiantes con discapacidad?":
En el vídeo Accessibility Challenges with Single Page Applications se explican algunos de los problemas de accesibilidad que presentan las single-page applications.
La descripción del vídeo dice:
Have you been tempted to use the WordPress API to drive a SPA (Single Page Application)? SPAs are notorious for being inaccessible, and for good reason. Tutorials introducing developers to frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular seem like they never take accessibility into consideration at all and teach some less than ideal practices. It is absolutely true that SPAs have a lot of accessibility challenges around things like dynamic content updates and managing focus. But with some smart choices and careful coding, it is possible to make SPAs more accessible. We’ll step through planning and building an accessible SPA, including best practices, accessibility testing tools, manual testing, and integrating accessibility into your development workflow.
When it comes to prioritizing web accessibility fixes, ranking the severity of each issue is an effective way to prioritize and make impactful improvements. In WebAIM’s accessibility audits, each issue we identify is assigned one of four levels of severity based on how it impacts end users. In this article, we’ll go over these severity ratings for accessibility and the types of issues that typically fall under these categories.
El 30 de noviembre de 2023, en el número 9052 del Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya se publicó el DECRETO 209/2023, de 28 de noviembre, por el que se aprueba el Código de accesibilidad de Cataluña.
Según la propia Generalitat de Catalunya, Cataluña se convertía en referente en accesibilidad universal.
¿Será verdad?
Bueno, en la página 373, la última página de este Decreto, podemos encontrar esta maravilla:
W
Web accesible: web que permite que las personas con discapacidad puedan percibir, entender, navegar e interactuar mediante páginas web accesibles que incluyan todos los contenidos y cumplen lo que establece la norma UNE 139803:2012 Requisitos de accesibilidad para contenidos en la web.
¿En serio? ¿La norma UNE 139803:2012?
