World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards and guidelines to ensure the long-term growth of the web.
One of the core principles of W3C is to ensure the Web for all. Out of the need to support the creation of websites that work for persons with disabilities, W3C put together the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an initiative led by W3C to bring together people from the web industries, disability organizations, government bodies, policy makers, research labs, etc., from around the world to develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to persons with disabilities.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works in five levels
- Ensuring that web technologies support accessibility
- Developing guidelines for accessibility
- Improving tools to evaluate and repair accessibility
- Developing tools for education and outreach
- Coordinating with research and development
As part of the third level of work of WAI, W3C has created and published a set of guidelines for ensuring accessibility in web technologies. These guidelines are named the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Reference Link: https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php
These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible to persons with disabilities and the current version is known as the WCAG 2.0 which was published in December of 2008.
At first, the guidelines can appear pretty complex. However, the guidelines and all its components are logical and with some effort, anybody can understand and learn how to use and comply with these guidelines.
The WCAG 2.0 consists of four layers of guidance that describe the overall principles, general guidelines, testable success criteria and proper techniques to achieving accessibility. These 4 layers are:
- Principles: The top level of guidance that describes the overall principles that provide the foundation for Web Accessibility: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.
- Guidelines: Under the principles, there are, in total, 12 guidelines that describe the goals that the developers and content creators should work on to achieve Web Accessibility.
- Success Criteria: For each guideline, testable success criteria are defined that can be used to test the level of accessibility. There are 3 levels of success criteria defined, Level A for Basic, Level AA for Recommended and Level AAA for Ideal.
- Sufficient and Advisory Techniques: For the guidelines and success criteria, WCAG also defines various techniques to better achieve and comply with them while developing content and technologies for the web.
- Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. i.e. Users must be able to perceive the information being presented in the form of the senses that they possess.
- Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable. i.e. Users must be able to operate the interface and should not consist of interaction that a user can not perform.
- Understandable: Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable. i.e. User must be able to understand the content and the interface and should not go beyond any user’s understandings.
- Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. i.e. Users must be able to access the content with any technology as they advance. If any of these is not true, persons with disabilities will not be able to use the website.
WCAG 2.0 Guidelines
There are 12 guidelines defined by WCAG 2.0 that a developer or a content creator of the web should comply to, in order to make their websites accessible to persons with disabilities. The guidelines are categorized under the four principles mentioned above.
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