This is the final incarnation of PAS78,  ‘Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites’ published in 2006 by the Disability Rights Commission, before its abolition.

The document passed into the hands of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and was then transferred to BSI ( responsible for British Standards).

PAS78 was directed principally at those commissioning new websites, giving advice and guidance particularly aimed at Local Authorities and other public bodies.

The draft of BS8878 appears to have retained a great deal, but with some restructuring and much new content, and addressed to a slightly wider audience..

Here is the BSI description, taken from the announcement on the BSIGroup website

Draft BS 8878:2009 Web accessibility. Building accessible experiences for disabled people. Code of practice

BS 8878 will suggest a practical process for ensuring that the private and public sectors successfully produce digital design that is inclusive of as many of the user population as possible. While disabled people are intended to be the key beneficiaries of the new approach, people whose first language is not English and everyone who reads web content over a mobile device stand to benefit from an approach that encourages the development of ‘accessible user experiences’.

The new standard, BS 8878, will point to the following guidance, published by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI):

 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)

and the guidance of software developers such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and IBM.

The standard BS 8878 will not be a technical document. Rather, it is aimed at senior managers, senior marketers and anyone who commissions web projects.

You can view the draft on the BSI website, but to do so you must register/login here.

Once you are registered, you will find a facility allowing you to comment on the draft. Comments are requested until January 30th 2009, and it is expected that the final document will be issued a few months later.

It seems likely that when the UK legislation is updated (probably around the same time), to allow ratification of the UN Convention (planned for Spring 2009), this new British Standard will be referenced, and thus gain some force in law.

These guideline documents (and the relevant UN Convention) are discussed in detail in the relevant sections on this website, see the links on the right.

On 11th December the second prong, the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, underwent a huge updating and modernisation.

These guidelines are the responsibility of the World Wide Web Consortium, and the previous issue  has been in force since May 1999. As you can imagine, by now it is hugely out of date in the light of big changes in website techniques and functionality in the last nine and a half years.

For more than five years, multiple working groups have been developing and refining version 2.0, and three days ago finally saw its official launch.

The impact of this cannot be overstressed. UK government disability law, for instance, is framed to require adherence to these international guidelines, with different grades of compliance for private and governmental organisations.

These new website testing guidelines will thus effect not just every disability website, but every website to which any disabled users may desire access,. The website owner already has legal obligations under various legislation, principally the Disability Discrimination Act, to make reasonable accomodation to their needs, whether sight-impaired, blind, deaf, mobility challenged etc.

Whilst these new testing guidelines herald a big positive step forward in web accessibility for the disabled, the changes are so great that they will render obsolete virtually all the automated disabled accessibility testing tools currently in use for evaluation of website usability. These will require major updating or indeed replacement to meet the new testing guidelines.

Similarly usability practitioners will have to re-appraise their procedures and reporting methodologies to accurately gauge the required disability compliance.

In all, this is a very significant day for the disabled, and a new and exciting challenge for those who are tasked with creating websites they can really use.