Reply to official title of WCAG

The W3C launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in April 1997.  One of its first working groups was the Guidelines (GL) Working Group which began developing the "Page Authoring Guidelines".  Very soon after work began, the product was renamed as the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)".

The document that formed the core of WCAG's first draft was the "Unified web site accessibility guidelines" developed in the mid-1990s by Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden and his team at the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In 1994/1995 I developed a simplified Web-based version of the "Unified web site accessibility guidelines" while working at the Adaptive Computer Technology Centre at Environment Canada.  (You can still find a version of that HTML 3.2 guide on my web site… I kept it for historical reasons.)  http://www.starlingweb.com/acc/index.htm  Nowadays it's good for a laugh, but at the time it was pretty cool.

Gregg and I were appointed as co-chairs of the GL group at its first working meeting in the summer of 1997.