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Another major criticism of the WCAG 1.0 guidelines was how difficult it is to find specific guidance and answers. It doesn't take too long to discover that the WCAG 2.0 guidelines quite clearly offer the same low level of usability.

Reasons for this poor usability include:

* The level of jargon and complexity of language is truly phenomenal (as outlined above)
* The text is littered with links making it very difficult to read
* The two main documents, Understanding WCAG 2.09 and Techniques for WCAG 2.03 are 164 and 363 pages long in total (when doing a print preview)

If only the W3C carried out basic usability testing of how people actually use (or are unable to use) these guidelines! What they'd undoubtedly find is that users won't understand most guidelines and will end up blindly clicking links to find out how to meet these guidelines.

As with WCAG 1.0, clicking on most links from the WCAG 2.0 guidelines simply takes users into the middle of massive pages full of difficult-to-understand text. The text, of course, is densely littered with links. Users will probably click on a link again in the desperate hope that they'll somehow find some text that clearly and succinctly explains what they need to do. They'll usually be disappointed.

Organising the massive amount of content available is certainly not an easy task - but why not, as a start, split up these massive documents into more manageable and less intimidating sets of smaller documents? Then, carry out some usability testing, refine, and test again.

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Technology neutral and the concept of the baseline.