Lisa Seeman wrote:
<quote>
ISO IL (Israel accessibility group) is  starting to make a certification 
program for accessibility. I have some concerned about it. If anyone has 
any experience with certification in different countries can they be in touch.

One control I thought was essential to put in place was a test for 
accessibility to test the tester. That will protect against people being 
able to certify sites because of belonging to the right group, and also 
make sure that anyone qualified to give accessibility certification will be 
able to do so without prejudice.
</quote>

Martyn Cooper mentioned a certification scheme at CEN-ISSS 
(http://www.cenorm.be/cenorm/businessdomains/businessdomains/isss/activity/ws-wac.asp). 
What this scheme does not have, however, is an evaluation methodology. A 
cluster of three projects funded by the European Commission has been 
working on an evaluation methodology called UWEM; version 0.5 is based on 
WCAG 1.0 (http://www.wabcluster.org/uwem05/) and contains tests for the 
Priority 1 checkpoints in WCAG 1.0. An updated version, which will also 
include tests for Priority 2 checkpoints, should become available during 
the summer.

The CEN-ISSS Certification scheme that Andrew Arch mentioned is meant to 
harmonize the various certifications schemes and evaluation methodologies 
that exist in various European countries. During the development of the 
evaluation methodology mentioned above, several existing schemes (including 
two of those you mentioned) were compared, in order to create the "Unified 
Web Evaluation Methodology" (UWEM).

Lisa Seeman also asked:
<quote>
Do we have a few test pages of inaccessible sites for testing of testers/ 
guidelines / etc
</quote>

The BenToWeb project (one of the projects mentioned above) is developing a 
suite of test files for WCAG 2.0. The current version is based on the 30 
June 2005 Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 and is available at 
http://www.bentoweb.org/ts/XHTML1/home. It contains 477 test cases. In the 
next few months, this "test suite" will be updated to the Last Call Working 
Draft of WCAG 2.0. Feel free to contact me if you want more information.

Regards,

Christophe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/