That undefined situation makes that the W3C stands on a neutral position about technology, but not about its use.

Problems attached to this neutrality are:

• they cannot specify which or how much support there must be for a particular use of a Web technology to be classified as accessibility supported
• you can use web technologies in an un-accessible way, but you must provide an accessible alternative version
• You can use a technology in an accessibility support way, but it don’t imply that all uses of that technology or all the versions of that technology are supported

Remember that we can only audit complete webpages, not technologies.

Technology Uses List

Unfortunately, we must trust on anyone (individuals, companies, universities, vendors…) who document accessibility supported uses. The only requisite is to meet the definition of accessibility support. In any case, an individual author won’t be able to test all the possible uses, so there will exist scattered documentation all over the web. And even worst, nobody will be capable to test all that tests. Can you imagine the lack of security this involves? The only thing that WAI warns is that

The Working Group anticipates that only documents that provide accurate information and benefit both authors and users will achieve market recognition in the long term.

If you want to create your own list, follow the instructions provided in Documenting Accessibility Support for Uses of a Web Technology

More info

• Understanding Accessibility Support
• Understanding Accessibility-Supported Web Technology Uses

a Web content technology is “accessibility supported” when users’ assistive technologies will work with the Web technologies AND when the accessibility features of mainstream technologies will work with the technology.

So if you want to decide by yourself if a web content technology is accessibility supported, you must check that:

• The Web content technology is supported by users agents, including assistive technology, in the same human language.
• Users can get accessibility-supported user agents to support that content. This can be achieved by one of these:
  • it’is supported natively in widely-distributed user agents or by a widely-distributed plug-in that are also accessibility supported (such as HTML and CSS);
  • You can control which user agents do your users use to access to your content, eg, an intranet. Obviously, the user agent required and used is also accessibility supported;
  • You can download or buy the user agent in an easy way. This process will not discriminate against people with or without disabilities.

In the next post I will introduce the importance of the use of technologies because depending on the way we use them, they become accessibility supported or not. Weird, isn’t it?

More info

• Understanding Accessibility Support

• How many user agents (including assistive technologies) must support a web technology to be considered as ‘accessibility supported’?
• What if a web technology is supported in one environment and not in other? You may only need a particular user agent, or a combination of many?
• Which languages and dialects must support the user agent to support web technologies? E.g. Screen readers may not understand ‘Chinese’  content at all.
• Backwards compatibility? E.g. Imagine that 3D web navigation technologies arise. Old computers and software won’t be capable to show that content. But that is not an obstacle to consider that this 3D technology (maybe) is accessibility supported.
• Unless you provide all your users with the proper user agent to display your content, there must be different options for the users to access to that content, particularly if they cannot afford assistive technology. Usually assistive technology is expensive and not everyone can afford them. Beside, free or lowcost assistive technology don’t have the same performance as expensive equipment.

So you can deduct that it is not easy to define which web technologies are accessibility supported and which are not. The WAI understand this problem and trust the community to select them. Yes, each company, government or  association can evaluate. So prepare yourself for a bunch of resolutions. As the WCAG 2 says:

this lack of generally available yet robust assistive technologies is a problem that affects users, technology developers and authors negatively.

In the next post we will see how to reduce this uncertainty.

More info

• Understanding Accessibility Support

WCAG 2 has tried to overcome a big problem that WCAG 1 has: technology dependence. WCAG 1 checkpoints included many times the phrase “Until user agents allow…” or “Until user agents can…”. But the WAI never updated the official document “User agent support for technology“. So we had a nice dead end.

WAI has tried to overcome this situation making the WCAG 2 neutral from technology. But it has created another problem. As Joe Clark’s posted on A list apart “To hell with WCAG 2“:

WCAG 1 was strongly HTML-specific. Everybody recognized that as a problem in an age when formats that blind people love to hate, like PDF and Flash, are slowly becoming accessible. So WCAG 2 had to be technology-neutral.
But in so doing, it imagined a parallel universe in which the vast majority of web content ceased to be plain-Jane HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It envisioned a world in which lots and lots of Flash, PDF, and other, as-yet-uninvented formats were available and intended to be accessible. To accommodate this dreamworld, WCAG 2 was written and rewritten and rerewritten to apply to everything. Along the way, it lost the ability to apply to the real things real developers work on every day—plain-Jane HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I will try to explain the concept “Accessibility support by 3 examples”:

• If you include a movie on your page, how do you include the subtitles?
• If you include an image, how do you include the alternate text?
• If you include a custom control (e.g. a flash interactive movie), how do you include an alternative content?

The key is to include the alternative version in a way that user agents including assistive technologies can understand and use. That’s “Accessibility Supported”.

So, what’s the big deal on it? Well, WCAG 2 has thought even on technologies that are not already invented.

“Accessibility Supported” means

• The new technologies are designed in a way that user agents including assistive technologies could access all the information they need to present the content to the user.
• the user agents and assistive technologies may need to be redesigned or modified to be able to actually work with these new technologies.

So, if the two previous points are true, the technology will work with user agents and assistive technologies.

Stay tuned for more info on accessibility support…

More info

• Understanding Accessibility Support