What Is The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

Date First Published: 3rd September 2023

Topic: Computer Systems

Subtopic: Legislation & User Data Protection

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn about what the Web Content Accesibility Guidelines is in this article.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a set of guidelines and recommendations released by the W3C for making webpages accessible to all, including people with disabilities and highly limited devices. The first version of WCAG was released on 9th May 1999 as WCAG 1.0 and defined 14 guidelines. Later, WCAG 2.0 was released and consisted of 12 guidelines organised under 4 principles.

Versions

Over time, different versions of WCAG have been released. Below is information on the different versions.

WCAG 1.0

WCAG 1.0 consist of 14 guidelines. These describe a general principle of accessible design. The guidelines were:

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.
2. Don't rely on colour alone
3. Use markup and style sheets, and do so properly
4. Clarify natural language usage
5. Create tables that transform gracefully
6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
9. Design for device independence
10. User interim solutions
11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
12. Provide context and orientation information
13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms
14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple

WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 consist of 12 guidelines organized under four principles. The four principles include:

• Perceivable - Users must be able to perceive it in some way, using one or more of their senses.
• Operable - Users must be able to control UI elements (e.g. buttons must be clickable in some way).
• Understandable - The content must be understandable to its users.
• Robust - The content must be developed using well-adopted web standards that will work across different browsers now and in the future.

The three levels of conformance (A, AA, and AAA) used in WCAG 2.0 have been modified from those in WCAG 1.0. The WCAG working group has a detailed list of web accessibility methods and common WCAG 2.0 failure cases. A newer version of WCAG 2.0, known as WCAG 2.1 is backwards-compatible with WCAG 2.0, which extends it with a further 17 success criteria.

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