WCAG 2.0 Moves To Next Stage
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has now resolved most of the 200+ editorial and technical comments on the most recent draft of WCAG 2.0 and is preparing the document for the next stage in the W3C Process - “Candidate Recommendation”.
The Documentation Process
Documents such as WCAG 2.0 go through 5 distinct stages before they can become a full World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard:
- Working Draft - a series of drafts that are published and announced specifically to ask for review and input from the community.
- Last Call Working Draft - the complete document for community review. If the review results in significant changes, the document may be re-issued as another Last Call Working Draft before moving to the next stage.
- Candidate Recommendation - An opportunity for the Working Group to elicit comments based upon “implementation experience” from developers who actively try using the proposed standard in their web projects. Although the document many now be considered relatively stable, it may change based on implementation feedback.
- Proposed Recommendation - used to gather endorsements of the, now stable, technical report
- W3C Recommendation - the final Web Standard
The Next Stage
The WCAG Working Group hopes to publish WCAG 2.0 as a “Candidate Recommendation” in April or May 2008 and will be providing information on how you can help test WCAG 2.0 implementation and contribute implementation feedback.
Depending on the duration of the Candidate Recommendation stage, the final draft of WCAG 2.0 (”Proposed Recommendation”) could be available the third quarter of 2008.