After a long wait, the W3C have finally announced that the web content accessibility guidelines has now made it to a W3C recommendation. For the full press release form the W3C please read W3C Web Standard Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web
I still need to have a look in more depth at the WCAG 2.0 guidelines but it’s definitely a step in the right direction over the WCAG 1.0 guidelines from what I’ve read so far and allows for a lot more common sense when building websites.
Web designers that are familiar with accessibility (and if you’re not then now is really the time to start learning) then you’ll find the following document extremely useful to discover the changes between WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 in Comparison of WCAG 1.0 Checkpoints to WCAG 2.0.
There’s also a few useful links on 456 Berea Street to help developers Going from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0.
The WCAG 2.0 guidelines aren’t perfect and with the web moving forward all the time it’s unlikely that they ever will be but from my initial impressions it is a big improvement and anyone working in the industry really should get up to speed with them as quickly as possible.