WCAG – The one ring to rule them all
One common acronym that has run throughout many of the blog posts here is WCAG. It stands for “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines” and comes from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It’s a set of guidelines designed for websites and content, but has been adopted as the standard for digital accessibility.
In this post I’ll be looking at what WCAG is and some of the ways it influences how we build. I’ll cover Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Pages but the overall standard applies to everything. I’m talking Microsoft 365, Web Design, pro-code apps, and more.
The tail that WCAGs the dog
Well, it should do at least!
At the heart of the guidelines are four simple principles. Handily these form the POUR acronym:
- P – Perceivable. This means that content can be presented and consumed in different ways. For example, alt text for images, captions on videos and audio, colours that can be seen,
- O – Operable. In several posts the topic of alternative navigation gets covered. That’s part of the Operable section. There’s also elements such as timing on content to allow people to read or view it. Easy to navigate and find content also features here.
- U – Understandable. Is text readable and is it easy to understand? Does the user interface help people avoid errors, and correct them? This principle ensures that content makes sense and helps, not hinders.
- R – Robust & Reliable. In some ways this is the toughest to meet. It refers to making content work in current and future tools. That can be screen readers, voice control, and even the web browsers etc. that people use.
You can read the overall guidelines and principles over at the WCAG website here. Thankfully, this is one set of standards that is amazingly easy to read and understand!
The Headliners
There is a lot contained in WCAG. Whilst it would be great to say “Go forth and implement” that’s not really practical. The “Quick Wins” post in this series (read the Q post here) provides some starting points.
The standards come with testable criteria that show a compliance level of A, AA, or AAA (or fail). AA is the minimum target to aim for. AAA is the ultimate Gold Standard and is the ideal one to go for.
Without repeating everything in the Quick Wins post here are some headliners to get you started:
- Colour Contrast ratios and Text Layout (using tags like H1, H2 etc)
- Alt text on images
- Alternative navigation methods. Keyboards, Voice control etc.
- Using clear and understandable language
Ideally organisations would create development standards that have WCAG and accessibility woven throughout. The reality is that most orgs don’t have standards to begin with let alone with accessibility in them. This is where we need to step forward and take on rewriting them. In the process we can encourage and educate so that people feel part of the process.
Compliance!
As a proud Gen-X’er I count “Flight of the Navigator” amongst my eternal childhood movies. Every time I hear the word “Compliance” I hear it in the ships voice.
Although I use Standards and Guidelines interchangeably, WCAG is a set of guidelines. That doesn’t mean you can’t be WCAG-Compliant though. It also definitely does not mean that you shouldn’t be aiming to achieve WCAG compliance!
As I say many times, 100% accessible is not achievable. There are too many variables and too many variances in us as people. What works for one could be the worst thing possible for another.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though. We keep pushing on and who knows, maybe together we might manage to cover off all the variants.
Targeting compliance, and recording where something isn’t met, is crucial as we move ever more into our digital world. An offline, analogue, life is something very few people could manage. Even then all bar the extreme survivalists still pop into town and use digital tech. With a global population of over 8bn people, the number of people needing assistive and accessible tech is only growing.
How cool would a WCAG checker app be that said “Compliance” every time you ticked an item off? Hmm, there’s an idea.
That’s WCAG folks!
Such a quick post for a pretty comprehensive standard. The fact is, it is so easy to read there is little point in me rewording it. So, I won’t.
And that’s it for the W in the A to Z Accessibility: Power Platform Edition. Nearing the end now everyone! To check out the series intro head to the first article here. You can also see all the posts by going here to the category page.
This series is all © Mike Hartley. I’m more than happy for you to quote snippets with attribution. If you do want to use larger portions, then please get in touch using the links on this site. The series represents a lot of work and time, so I hope you can value that. Thanks for reading, and good luck on your WCAG journey!