After all, if 1.2.6 becomes Advisory, doesn’t it just mean that either no-one cares or it’s impractical? Or maybe that text equivalents do the job better than sign language? Bear in mind that you don’t then have to worry about which sign language to use, let alone the technical difficulties of applying sign language interpretations to existing video and then how to stick them on a web page.

I suspect that, like many aspects of accessibility in life, a lot of people see these kind of requirements as PC-gone-mad, catering to every tiny minority, bleeding heart, small l-liberal, etc etc.

Maybe we need to help people to understand why this matters to everyone.

Then maybe the really clever ones can rise to the challenge of making the web truly accessible, to the point where universal access is simply taken for granted. Maybe we’ll even have the web set an example that the rest of the perceived world can follow.

I’ll be posting stuff here as I can, and I hope this can be one place where we can offer some practical ideas on how and why.