The De Facto Standards in Digital Accessibility by WCAG – AccessiBe Learning

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The Department of Justice in the United States has recently made many rulings by putting forth some clear requirements for digital entities to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The department specified the need for websites to be compliant and took some steps towards establishing the accessibility rules by adopting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG 2.0 standards.

WCAG de facto standards – AccessiBe

WCAG was established and managed by the Worldwide Web Consortium of W3C. WCAG puts forth a set of guidelines, which are internationally accepted in terms of digital accessibility. The latest version of WCAG is 2.1, which is specified at three levels A, AA, and AAA. However, AccessiBe points out that the 2.1 version came out in 2018, and most of the compliance requirements still follow the previous 2.0 version. Regardless of the technical standards in terms of the practical application of WCAG, you may ensure WCAG compliance in order to avoid any litigation and ensure that your website is accessible as per Federal Laws.

WCAG compliance standards

The accessibility standards as per WCAG compliance further break down into four basic areas as being perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Further, we will discuss some of these fundamental requirements.

Permeability – The user interface and informative components on the web pages should be presentable to various types of users in such a way that they can be easily perceived. It means that the users need to perceive the information which is being presented to them. Some recommendations are,

Providing text alternatives to multimedia elements.
Providing captions and alt tax for multimedia content in different ways to be interpreted by assistive technology.
Make it easy for users to hear and see the content.

Operability – The UI components and website navigation should be operable. This means that the users should be able to easily operate the interface. To ensure this,

Make all functionality accessible through the keyboard.
Give users time to read and use the content fully.
Help the users easily navigate and reach the needed content.

Understandability – All the information and user interface operations should be easily understandable. Any user on the page should easily understand the information and operations of the UI. For this,

Make the text understandable and readable.
Make the content appear in only predictable ways.
Help users to avoid any mistakes on-page navigation and content interpretation.

Robust – Any website should be robust to be interpreted reliably by assistive technologies like screen readers. For this, the users should be able to access the web page content by user agents, and the content should be accessible. Ensure compatibility with current assistive technologies and future user support tools.

It is advisable that you arrange your website based on the WCAG guidelines to see whether it complies with the accessibility requirements specified by the standards. If not, AccessiBe suggests that it is high time to take measures in order to ensure compliance.