Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.
WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria, is provided in separate documents. See Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview for an introduction and links to WCAG technical and educational material.
WCAG 2.0 succeeds Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [WCAG10], which was published as a W3C Recommendation May 1999. Although it is possible to conform either to WCAG 1.0 or to WCAG 2.0 (or both), the W3C recommends that new and updated content use WCAG 2.0. The W3C also recommends that Web accessibility policies reference WCAG 2.0.
WCAG is an evolving standard. WCAG 2.1 has reached candidate recommendation status and could see adoption in any new legislation as early as the summer of 2018. WCAG 2.1 is additive upon WCAG 2.0. In other words, a 2.1 conformant site will be 2.0 and 1.0 conformant so it makes sense to target WCAG 2.1 in any new initiatives.
WCAG 2.1 hierarchy. The four fundamental design principles put forth are:
- Information and user interface components must be presented in a way that they can perceive.
- User interface components and navigation must be operable.
- Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
- Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.
Within each of those principles are a series of guidelines. For example, subordinate to the first principle we will find the following guideline:
- Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simple layout) without losing information or structure.
Subordinate to that guideline we find these success criteria:
- Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text.
- When the sequence in which content is presented affects its meaning, a correct reading sequence can be programmatically determined.
- Instructions provided for understanding and operation content do not rely solely on sensory characteristics of components such as shape, size, visual location, orientation, or sound.
- The meaning of each input field collecting information about the user can be programmatically determined when:
- The input field has a meaning that maps to the HTML 5.2 Autofill field names; and
- The content is implemented using technologies with support for identifying the expected meaning of form input data.
- In content implemented using markup languages, the purpose of User Interface Components, icons, and regions can be programmatically determined.
For more information about Web Content Accessibility, please click here.
Quick disclaimer: We are not lawyers. Decisions you make to implement anything less than full compliance with all of the regulations described come with risk and should involve your legal team. Accessibility regulations vary by country.