The first in an ongoing series of articles about web accessibility issues, tips, tricks, and standards.
The new standard for accessibility on the web — WCAG2 — is almost with us, with the final publication of the standards expected to happen by the time the year is out. These new guidelines are a step forward from WCAG1, which was published back in 1999 and is severely outdated. WCAG isn’t as well known as some of the other WC3 standards, but in my opinion is just as important. Hopefully this article will serve as an introduction to the guidelines for when they are mentioned in future Accessible Web posts.
With WCAG1, latest technologies aren’t taken into account, so it’s very difficult to create a site that follows the guidelines that make use of these modern technologies. WCAG2 is technology independant, which should hopefully mean that in another ten years time when things have moved on again, WCAG2 will still be relevant.
WCAG2 introduces four principles to web accessibility: any content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. This means that the content should be visible to the user in some way (whether that is through text, sound, or touch), the user should be able to easily interact with the content, the content and user interface of the site should be easy enough to be understand by anybody, and it should be possible to access the site from any kind of browser — not just regular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. These four principles are the pillars behind the whole guideline documentation, and are the pillars behind the future articles within this series.
As with WCAG1, there are three levels of conformance. Each criteria in WCAG is leveled either A, AA, or AAA. In order to conform to Level A, all Level A criteria must be met. To conform to Level AA you should meet all Level AA and A criteria, and to conform to Level AAA all three levels should be met. This might sound confusing at first, but if you think of the success criteria as “meets all points for this level and all those below it”, hopefully it should all make sense.
Checking sites through WCAG may seem a bit of a waste of time, but accessibility is important to a website because not only does it improve the experience with those with disabilities, it also improves the experience for those without disabilities (this will be mentioned in further detail in another series of articles, about web usability). There are three levels of compliance, with the lowest level (Level A) being common sense and good design practice anyway.
Finally, it is worth noting that in this series of articles, I will be referring and linking to the relevant guideline in WCAG2 whenever they appear. From there you can find the conformance level, find more details on implementation of the guideline, and find out the different pros and cons of following the guideline which simply can’t be outlined in a weekly 500 word article.