Per the Department of Justice, the WCAG and Section 508 guidelines represent technical standards in accordance with ensuring accessibility for your business (HERE).
You can read the latest WCAG 2.1 guidelines right here. We’ll distill the main principles behind these guidelines with some examples:
- Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive:
- Making any time-based media ie photos/videos more accessible including captions, audio descriptions, and descriptions of images
- Sequence of content can be “programatically determined” depending on the context of the information
- Text alternatives to all non-text content
- Mechanism to pause/stop audio of any audio content that automatically plays for 3 or more seconds.
- The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 with some exceptions
- Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable:
- All functionality of the content is operable through a keyboard interface
- When an authenticated session expires, the user can continue the activity without loss of data after re-authenticating
- Users are warned of the duration of any user inactivity that could cause data loss (unless data has been preserved for more than 20 hours without user activity)
- Web pages do not contain anything that flashes more than three times in any one second period, or the flash is below the general flash and red flash thresholds
- Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable:
- A mechanism is available for identifying specific definitions of words or phrases used in an unusual or restricted way, including idioms and jargon
- A mechanism for identifying the expanded form or meaning of abbreviations is available
- Navigational mechanisms that are repeated on multiple Web pages within a set of Web pages occur in the same relative order each time they are repeated, unless a change is initiated by the user
- Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies:
- In content implemented using markup languages, elements have complete start and end tags, elements are nested according to their specifications, elements do not contain duplicate attributes, and any IDs are unique, except where the specifications allow these features.
- For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to user agents, including assistive technologies.
- In content implemented using markup languages, status messages can be programmatically determined through role or properties such that they can be presented to the user by assistive technologies without receiving focus.
We know these guidelines, even just these snippets, may feel daunting. We think it’s worth looking at the full guidelines here.
Section 508 guidelines are the accessibility guidelines followed by federal websites
