WCAG 2 - claiming conformance

Anyone wanting to claim conformance to the nascent WCAG 2.0 will have to provide a specific conformance claim on their site, according to the documentation found at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20:

Required components of a conformance claim

Conformance claims are not required. Authors can conform to WCAG 2.0 without making a claim. However, if a conformance claim is made, then the conformance claim must include the following information:

1. Date of the claim
2. Guidelines title, version and URI "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at {URI of final document}"
3. Conformance level satisfied: (Level A, AA or AAA)
4. A concise description of the Web pages such as a list of URIs for which the claim is made, including whether subdomains are included in the claim.
   • Note 1: The Web pages may be described by list or by an expression which describes all of the URIs included in the claim.
   • Note 2: Web-based products that do not have a URI prior to installation on the customer's Web site may have a statement that the product would conform when installed.
5. A list of the Web content technologies relied upon.
   
• Note: If a conformance logo is used, it would constitute a claim and must be accompanied by the required components of a conformance claim listed above.

Note - the concept of a technology baseline has been dropped.

The Understanding Conformance page gives some examples of wording. In the spirit of this, I decided to produce such a claim for my own Pretty Simple web site, which was used in the implementation report as part of the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation stage and has, since getting the thumbs up from the WCAG 2.0 Working Group, been claiming conformance.

On September 25th 2008, all Web pages found at www.prettysimple.co.uk conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20. Level Double-A conformance.

The web content technology relied upon is XHTML 1.0 (Strict).

The technologies used but not relied upon are: JavaScript, CSS 2.0, Flash.

I wasn't sure about where to put CSS, but felt that, as it is utilised purely for presentation and not content, it shouldn't be considered as a 'relied-upon' technology. The Flash banners are only for presentation, and have images with alt attributes behind them, so are certainly not relied upon. Equally, the Javascript used to bring in the RSS feeds on the Links page are accompanied by noscript links, so are not essential for any user.

I could also go into detail about the Level AAA Success Criteria that I meet, and may do this at some point in the future, along with details of the various user agents with which I have tested the site.

One question that has arisen is when might I be expected to update the statement? Presumably the next time I test the entire site, although given that I am making no significant changes to the pages - and only adding content occasionally, I might be forgiven for updating the date every time I update the website.