I’d appreciate you pointed me to a resource where I can find a Web page that doesn’t live up to the claims of the site owner as verified by Segala? We will review whatever you find immediately.

For those instances in which you use technologies outside of your baseline (i.e. having a baseline of HTML, but then adding a Quicktime or SMIL movie), check what the Reference with those technologies enabled would look like, but clearly mark out the additional (optional) technologies so that it’s clear your baseline does not directly require them.

And, to complement it all: if you find the examples (both of success and failure) in the Techniques document too far fetched, erroneous, or simply outdated, you may wish to write your own examples – maybe evene making them specific to your particular site/template/target audience/etc. Again, this will help disambiguate the tech-agnostic, fluffy guidelines for your own benefit and that of your developers.

As mentioned in the panel, unless there is legislation explicitly mandating that you conform to the letter of WCAG 1.0, don’t try to fervently follow the guidelines for the sake of them; understand the issues, understand what problem they actually try (or, considering they were written in 1999, tried) to solve, and – with an eye on modern best practices – address the issues. This means that certain guidelines can now be considered obsolete; I usually:

- ignore 1.5 – as I don’t normally use client-side maps, and apart from Lynx user agents can handle them fine nowadays anyway
- ignore 10.3 – as this has never been an issue in recent years if the content is marked up correctly
- ignore 10.4 – as discussed ad-nauseam, any modern combination of browser/AT can cope with empty form controls (apart from outdated, and in my view broken, braillers); in fact, pre-filled form fields can be a hindrance, or at least an annoyance, to many users who have to first delete the existing content that was so helpfully added
- ignore 10.5 from a technical accessibility point of view – if you’re debating adding “pipe” characters or similar, why not mark up lists of links as actual lists? if you must have adjacent links in a sentence, can a more natural choice like a comma work (i.e. can you make it fit the natural flow of the language and sentence, rather than artificially adding some printing character just to please automated checkers)? and, for usability reasons, you could increase the spacing/padding/margin of links ever so slightly if you do happen to have adjacent links with just non-printing characters in between…which is more of a usability issue really
- ignore 13.6 in most cases – it’s the user agent’s responsibility to provide better functionality to users to allow them to skip sections, block level elements, etc. it’s up to you (as a usability enhancement, again) if you want to provide a single “skip to the content” link or similar. use at your own discretion, but don’t feel that you *must* obey this rule unquestioned

So, if you start knowingly (and with valid reason) ignoring certain checkpoints, what complaince level should you claim? Well, I’d say: none. I usually mention that I “strive to adhere to WCAG 1.0 AA as interpreted by the web team”…no false claim, but it’s closer to the truth than those “AAA compliant Segala/Bobby/Whatever approved” buttons.

Once WCAG 2.0 comes around for real, I’ll pretty much be doing the same thing: unless mandated explicitly by law, I will draw my own conclusions from the guidelines and use them to inform my decisions in order to make my site accessible to *users*, not to a set of guidelines.