Declaring conformance on web accessibility - ANEC

• Certification bodies should ensure that the integrity of the approved website is maintained
following certification and that the organisation has plans in place for maintenance. It
should act to remove websites from the register if they fail to maintain the standard.
• Action is needed to further plans to harmonise accessibility evaluation procedures and
systems of <strong>conformance</strong> delaration to WCAG 2.0. It is noted that a previous attempt
through the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) project offered an opportunity
for harmonising accessibility evaluation throughout Europe but failed to achieve
international acceptance.
• Website developers and owners should make use of appropriate declaration for their
business type and promote their achievements by providing a clear statement of
accessibility policy.
• Website developers and owners should put in place a maintenance plan and retest to
ensure that the website pages remains accessible. When adding new multimedia elements
and other ‘non-text’ elements they should ensure that these, and their control elements are
identifiable in accordance with WCAG 2.0.
• Automatic evaluation tools alone are insufficient to identify all criteria at WCAG 2.0 level A
but can be used to highlight specific issues. Human intervention is currently still needed for
judgement calls and interpretation of the many techniques and results. It is recommended
that training on awareness and best practice should be focussed on the five criteria which
are most commonly failed.
• W3C should have in place some element of quality control to assess whether the WCAG
logo and links are mis-used since in the long term this will devalue its usefulness in
identifying accessible websites.
ANEC Print version 21 May 2011 Page 5 Declaration of <strong>conformance</strong>