Accessibility for All: A guide to web accessibility standards

Whether it’s a temporary injury, a noisy environment, or even a situation where you’re holding a coffee in one hand and navigating your phone with the other, we all experience moments where enhanced accessibility can make a significant difference. Join us as we delve into the ways that building for inclusivity not only benefits individuals with permanent disabilities but also supports the diverse needs of all users in various contexts of daily life.

WCAG, W3C, WAI, What?

Accessibility doesn’t like abbreviations. While making text and names more concise and quicker to type, they can often introduce confusion and lead to misunderstandings. Most likely, we have all experienced that baffling feeling in our daily company meetings, attempting to decipher an alphabet soup of acronyms, haven’t we? Worldwide standard definitions are often full of them though and it is no different in case of web accessibility. Let’s break them down in a digestible way.

Let’s start with W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) plays a pivotal role in developing standards related to web development, which are known as W3C Recommendations.

WAI which stands for Web Accessibility Initiative is a vital part of W3C efforts to improve the accessibility of the internet. The WAI develops guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for web accessibility.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Best example of guidelines created by WAI are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines also known as WCAG and often pronounced as “wuh-cag”. They consist of twelve guidelines, and are organized around four key principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. Each guideline has testable success criteria – there are 86 of them in total (v2.2).

Let’s take a closer look at this set of recommendations as they are crucial for web designers and engineers in making web content more accessible to people with various impairments. That includes auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities.

WCAG Principles

It’s worth to know how the recommendations are grouped together by the principles. What do they mean? How may they impact our work?

Perceivable

Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. Example? Alternative text added to image which is a description of the picture content. In case the users suffer from visual impairments, they still have an alternative way to know what the content of the image is.

Operable

User interface components and navigation must be operable. This means that the product must be compatible with different input methods and can’t rely on operations of only one type. For instance, it would be good if desktop application could be navigated not only by mouse but also keyboard or voice commands.

Understandable

Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This principle leads us to creating content which is easily readable and predictable, with clear labels and usage instructions. We should avoid long single-page forms where it is easy to lose the context, split larger text chunks and remember to keep the flows simple.

Robust

Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies, browsers and devices so no one is excluded because of their preferences.

Levels of conformance

WCAG categorizes its recommendations into three levels of conformance:

• Level A: Essential accessibility features that are a must for assistive technologies compatibility.
• Level AA: Addresses the major known accessibility issues and is considered the standard for most websites. Tesco Technology also aims for AA compliance in its applications.
• Level AAA: The highest level of accessibility and includes enhancements that may not be necessary for some users but provide a better user experience. Usually implemented by applications aimed at a particular audience.

Criteria in detail

As with many other standards, my first experience with WCAG criteria was a bit hard to swallow. There is quite a lot of them, they are written in a way that you must put some thought to understand it and the deadlines are constantly closing in. It is easy to feel demotivated just after a brief look at them.

WCAG is not something new. First version of guidelines has been published in 1999 followed by version 2.0 in 2001. Since then, they haven’t changed much as current version number is 2.2. Criteria added recently provide more recommendations for new types of devices which are widely used for web content consumption. There are also new sections that detail aspects of privacy and security impact.

Let’s take a closer look at an example WCAG success criterion, the one added with most recent update. They are not as bad as they seem to be!

We can see that the criterion has specified a reference number, a title, conformance level and a definition.

Looking at the document we could break it down in such way:

• Goal: Don’t rely only on dragging for user actions.
• Action: For any action that involves dragging, provide another pointer alternative.
• Reason: Some people cannot use a mouse to drag elements.

But what about this bit? “...unless dragging is essential or the functionality is determined by the user agent and not modified by the author.”

It means there are actions defined by a browser or operating system of user’s device that developers do not have any control of. Example of such action could be dragging to scroll on touchscreen devices. Your application will be compliant with these criteria even without providing an alternative to scrolling gesture.

That’s all folks!

Adhering to these guidelines is not just about compliance. It is about reaching out to a wider audience, improving user experience, and fostering an environment where everyone has equal access to information and services. As the internet continues to grow, web accessibility standards will play a crucial role in shaping an inclusive digital future.

Next up

In the upcoming articles of this series, you’ll discover practical ways to comply with WCAG standards and enhancing your application’s accessibility with minimal effort. You will learn to evaluate your application for accessibility compliance, explore various forms of assistive technologies, and understand how to craft a user experience that fosters greater inclusivity.

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