Skip to content

A podcast for those who design, develop and run websites.

Boagworld is the personal website of Paul (the Wurzel) Boag who lives in the heart of rural Dorset. He produces a weekly podcast along with Marcus (pop star) Lillington on all things relating to building and running websites.

Latest shows

138. Freeform
In this week's show the entire boagworld production team answer listener questions.
137. Adobe
In this week's show, Aral Balkan joins us to discuss the release of Adobe CS4 and we discuss how not to get blacklisted by google.
136. Stagnation
In this week's show we talk about overcoming stagnation and Ed Merritt shares a technique to achieve fixed footers without the use of javaScript.
135. Libraries
In this week's show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?
134. Chrome
In this weeks show we give you advice on choosing the right hosting company, Teifion and John send us a review of dConstruct and of course we discuss the release of Google Chrome, can it topple IE?

or view all shows

Have your say

Leave a message for the show...

Buy my book: The website owners manual. A book for all those involved in designing, developing or running websites on a daily basis.

atMedia: WCAG 2.0

Published on: June 15, 2006 by Paul Boag

Although there has been a lot of criticism of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and I am still as confused about what they actually say, at least I can now see some hope for the future of accessibility.

the focus should be on making your site more accessible not covering the collective arse.

This session had a lot of back and forth over the pros and cons of the new guidelines but the underlying message is that we need to start looking beyond just checking the accessibility box.

As I have said in our podcast, accessibility should be more than just conforming to a set of guidelines. The message today was that you need to carefully consider your accessibility policy for each website you create. You need to balance accessibility with design and business consideration. You need to look at the requirements of your target audience and respond swiftly to comments from your users.

A lot of organisations want to conform to a specific level purely to prevent themselves from being sued. However, as long as an organisation responds in a timely manner to complaints about inaccessible content, they really are in no danger from disability discrimination legislation. The result is that the focus should be on making your site more accessible not covering the collective arse.

I was pleasantly surpised by this pragmatic, real world approach to accessibility. Most refreshing...

And Joe Clark's article on A List Apart was only mentioned six times ;)

Comments

Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email

  • Post by patrick h. lauke on June 19, 2006 12:20 AM

    i'm glad that at least someone got the point of our panel...currently swimming in a sea of "dry and boring" remarks...

  • Post by Andy Saxton on June 20, 2006 10:43 AM

    Dry and Boring? What were they expecting rounded corners and drop shadows / reflections?

  • Post by Paul Boag on June 25, 2006 7:28 PM

    Ah Patrick,
    such is the curse of the Blogosphere! Why stick your neck out and praise something when you can play safe and criticize!

Leave a comment

Additional Information

Supporting boagworld

Boagworld only exists thanks to the kind support of the following people. Check them out.

Speaking and writing

In Association with feed.informer.com