Week 15 Activity 4.2 - WAI-ARIA Technical Issues

Write notes in your blog about the challenges that you face in creating accessible resources in a technical environment that is frequently changing. What strategies have you used to cope with this?

One of the most common complaints about accessibility guidelines seems to be that they are difficult to understand. The Introduction to WAI-ARIA by Gez Lemon (2008) gives quite a useful overview of the WAI-ARIA in relatively non-technical terms, and for me was much easier to follow than the guidelines on the W3C WAI website itself.

I think, from my own point of view, with a technical environment that is always changing and developing the main problem might be that guidelines tend to be a reactionary measure. There is a decision to be made about whether to become early adopters of these innovative new technologies or wait until they have been standardised.

The only real strategy to adopt is to keep up to date with developments, through the developers of the new technologies, agencies like the W3C and so on. In my opinion that is a general strategy to be adopted as part of continuing professional development for anyone working in a constantly changing environment such as ICT's and does not only apply to accessibility.