WCAG 2 activity on cognitive disability

This page will act as a repository of documents on the WCAG Working Group's activities concerning cognitive disability (dyslexia and the like) under WCAG 2.

November 2006 memo

WCAG Working Group cochair Gregg Vanderheiden sent an E-mail dated 2006.11.22 to various parties interested in cognitive disability and WCAG 2. The E-mail contained four attachments in Microsoft Word format, providing further evidence of Vanderheiden’s inability to produce the accessible Web content his working group seeks to require.

For the purposes of criticism and review, the E-mail and attachments are provided here.

• Original E-mail
  1. Attachment A: “Cognitive or learning disability” (Microsoft Word original)
  2. Attachment B: “Direct Access and Special UA” (Microsoft Word original)
  3. Attachment C: “Going Beyond WCAG 2” (Microsoft Word original)

Eventual posting by Gregg Vanderheiden

WCAG Working Group cochair Gregg Vanderheiden eventually posted the original E-mail. In an admission that he is incapable of producing the standards-compliant HTML that even WCAG 1.0 demands, the attachments to that posting are the very files I created here. Of course, Vanderheiden couldn’t even duplicate my work adequately: He did not specify an external CSS file, he used dumb quotes, he added Unicode characters that make one of the files impossible to validate, and he added attributes illegal in HTML Strict.

At least I didn’t publish the E-mails of the addressees.

Why is this man still permitted to work in Web accessibility?

Recollections from late-2006 phone calls on LD accessibility

The WCAG Working Group has been going out of its way not to document the conference calls it held in late 2006 on accommodation of cognitive and learning disabilities in WCAG 2. Nonetheless, one participant wrote a recollection (lightly copy-edited).

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Updated 2007.01.15