What are the 4 WCAG guidelines?
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) play a pivotal role in enhancing the efficiency of websites from an accessibility standpoint. It provides a set of detailed technical guidelines that when implemented can ensure that a website is fully accessible and can be easily accessed by the disabled community. There are many key points related to web content accessibility that are covered in WCAG. In this article, you will get to know about the four important principles of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
What are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)?
WCAG is internationally recognized accessibility standards that have been developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It ensures that the web content is accessible and especially serves the disabled community appropriately. A wide range of disabilities including learning, language, cognitive, speech, physical, auditory and neurological disabilities are ably covered in WCAG. These guidelines also support older individuals whose abilities may differ due to aging.
WCAG provides a set of technical guidelines that provides working details about applications, websites and other digital properties that are accessible to all including disabled people.
Following are the four important principles of WCAG:
1. Perceivable: For every non-text content, the website content should have a text alternative. Through this, non-text content can be transformed into other forms like symbols, braille, speech etc. It analyzes how the website is perceived by visitors. Making a website perceivable means designing the website in such a manner that it can be easily viewed and accessed by disabled people.
Following are a few key points that can be taken into consideration:
- A simple layout needs to be used
- The content needs to be surrounded with whitespace
- Accurate and descriptive alt text needs to be added to all images
- Captions should be added to videos and specific alternatives should be offered for time-sensitive media
- The text should be magnified or zoomed to approximately 200 percent.
2. Operable: Those websites that are highly accessible are operable. Operability revolves around overall usability and navigation. A website might be perceived by a visitor, but, that does not mean the visitor is able to use or navigate it. This problem is solved when the website is made operable. If the website is operable then visitors can be able to navigate to certain sections of the website easily and thus will be able to consume content and click on website links.
Following are a few key points that can be taken into consideration:
- Keyboard shortcuts are offered
- The usage of animated flashing images is avoided
- An ample amount of time is given to visitors so that they may be able to consume content
- A simple navigation system is used that consists of menu links
- Breadcrumb links are included on each page
- A search box needs to be added to the website.
3. Understandable: In this principle, visitors are judged on how well they can interpret the website’s interface functions and content. The ways in which a visitor can comprehend and decipher the website are taken into consideration, WCAG testing also provides a tactical platform to make the website accessible.
Following are a few key points that can be taken into consideration:
- The functionality of all links should be double-checked
- Short sentences should be created for text content
- The text content should be structured with relevant subheadings.
4. Robust: The usability of a website across all platforms and mediums is adjudged in this principle. It ensures that a website is compatible with different web browsers. WCAG testing can also be performed to check the website’s compatibility.
Following are a few key points that can be taken into consideration:
- Browser compatibility errors need to be checked in for a website and if present it needs to be fixed
- The website’s HTML code should be validated by running it through validator.w3.org
- Except for empty elements, all HTML elements should have an opening and a corresponding closing tag.
Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing WCAG testing for your specific website or application, then do get connected with a leading software testing company in United Kingdom that will provide you with a strategic testing roadmap in line with your project requirements.
