What Are The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

Because the internet is a global community, an international group has been formed to help guide the progression of the online world.

In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium, WC3, was founded.

The World Wide Web Consortium is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. In a nutshell, these are the standards everyone in the technology community should be working towards.

On May 5, 1999, The World Wide Web Consortium released the first Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), designed to improve the online experience of users with disabilities.

As technology grows the guidelines grow to be more and more inclusive of people with disabilities.

On August 11, 2020, the working draft of WCAG 2.2 was released and is expected to be adopted by November 2020.

While each version of the WCAG changes to keep up with advancements in technology, here are the founding principals.

The Four Principles of Accessibility

The World Wide Web Consortium bases WCAG around four principles of accessibility. Web pages can use elements like alternative text and accessible PDFs to follow ADA compliance. Any web page or document that isn’t using accessibility practices to eliminate barriers for the four principles is considered inaccessible to people with disabilities.

The four principles are:

• Perceivable: The contents of the page must be detectable to everyone, no matter what their disability. They can’t be hidden from people who can’t see small print, for example.
• Operable: All users must be able to interact with the components of the page. A website mustn’t provide buttons that can only be clicked by using a mouse, since some people with disabilities can’t use a mouse, and instead use a keyboard, voice control or some other interface.
• Understandable: All users must be able to understand the meaning of the information on the page, as well as the instructions for interacting with the page’s components.
• Robust: No matter what a web page looks like or what it contains, it has to remain able to be used and understood on a wide variety of devices using a wide range of assistive technologies like screen readers.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The guidelines are intended to be testable criteria to help determine if a website is easily accessible for people with disabilities.

Each guideline also has a set of requirements, known as Success Criteria.

In order to conform to WCAG’s standards, you need to test your website to ensure all elements meet the Success Criteria. Levels of Accessibility

While most standards have only one level of conformance, to meet the needs of advancing technology and help websites become complaint WCAG 2.1 designated three levels of conformance:

Level A

Level A includes the simplest website changes, such as color contrast and font resizing. While these changes will certainly enhance the experience of a disabled user, it would not make the site completely accessible.

Level AA

Level AA includes all requirements from Level A plus additional accessibility elements that will further enhance the users experience and allow the site to function nearly equally for a person identifying as disabled.

Level AAA

Level AAA is the highest level of accessibility, including all requirements from Levels A and AA plus additional elements that will ensure the site functions identically for every visitor, regardless of ability level.

Examples of Success Criteria

Simple examples of success criteria include:

• Providing captions for audio tracks so people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will understand audio information.
• Ensuring that text can be resized without disrupting the page so people with vision disabilities can magnify content.
• Turning off or extending time limits on tasks, so that people who need more time to fill out a form or make a selection won’t be excluded.
• Designing components to be in consistent and expected places on different pages of a website, so people will always know where they can find these components as they navigate through the website.
• Simplifying navigation to ensure new windows do not open unexpectedly becoming disorientating to the user.
• Ensuring site content is accessible to screen readers and keyboard navigation.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines can look like an incredibly overwhelming document (the thing is over 100 pages long) and written for technical folks, but at it's core it is a collection of best practices and manageable changes that can be implemented in every website.