W3C Releases Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Written by: Mary Donnelly on December 14th, 2008

On Dec 12, 2008, W3C announced the publication of WCAG 2.0. An online press release can be found here: http://www.w3.org/2008/12/wcag20-pressrelease.html and the guidelines can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/.

The following are the key differences between 1.0 and 2.0 guidelines:

Principles: 1.0 has 14 principles at the highest level; 2.0 has only 4 principles at the highest level.
Technologies: 1.0 guidelines are very specific to HTML; 2.0 has a separate technique document that includes: HTML and XHTML, CSS, Server-side Scripting, SMIL, Plain Text, and ARIA techniques.
Priorities: Each guideline in 1.0 is assigned a priority and many of the guidelines are considered priority 2 and 3 guidelines which are “less important” than priority 1 guidelines. Each guideline in 2.0 is considered equally important and to have an equal priority, but each can be implemented to a lesser or greater level:: A (lowest level), AA, and AAA (highest level).
Some of the guidelines in 1.0 are left open to interpretation; 2.0 includes testable success criteria for each guideline.

Comparison of 1.0 checkpoints to 2.0 can be found here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/from10/comparison/.

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