Watchfire
join forces with Paciello Group
I nearly missed this one - and even if it is over a week old, it will still be news to a lot of people:
Watchfire Corporation has announced a partnership with The Paciello Group’s (TPG) accessibility consulting practice. Beginning immediately, TPG will exclusively use Watchfire’s AccessibilityXM as part of its Accessibility Audit practice. Meanwhile, Watchfire will make use of TPG’s training and consulting practice to complement its technology offering. In other words - a bit of collective back scratching.
This is a good thing - despite Watchfire owning Bobby, I think that they are still relative newcomers in the field of accessibility. I’ve met a few people from Watchfire, and they certainly seem like they are switched on, but you can’t beat practical experience. Hopefully working closely with Mike Paciello (author of Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities) and his team will enable Watchfire to improve the accessibility part of its product somewhat.
Personally speaking, I think that most of the current accessibility checkers have one common failing - and this is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0. There are so many checkpoints in these guidelines - many of which are very restrictive (to the point of being laughable, in my opinion) or so out of date that they are largely irrelevent. However - they are the only ‘approved’ guidelines, and as such all these programs are based on that set of rules, and everyone suffers from information overload. Hopefully the final publication of version 2.0 of these guidelines will help resolve such issues (the working draft can be found here).
In the meantime, let’s hope that this partnership bears fruit - for both sides - and results in a better experience for everyone involved in wading through the mire of accessibility guidelines.