• Usability Blogs
• Newsletter archives
• Research Reports

WCAG 2.0 – A year later

In February 2009 UsabilityOne checked the accessibility compliance of twelve Federal Government websites against the Level A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 (read the full report). This exercise revealed that none of the reviewed websites completely adhered to WCAG 2.0; this was not surprising given that WCAG 2.0 had been released just two months earlier.

Now, a year later, we are pleased to see that more and more organisations, both governmental and private, are making changes to their websites to comply against WCAG 2.0.

In the private sector, over the last couple of months we have come across several companies announcing improvements to the accessibility of their website. Here are a few examples:

• On the 9^th of February Taget.com received the National Federation of the Blind Nonvisual Accessibility (NFB-NVA) Web Certification (read the press release).
• On the 11th of February, Major League Baseball (MLB) stated that they “are working to ensure that all content on www.mlb.com and all content on the club sites satisfy Level A and AA Success Criteria set forth in WCAG 2.0” (read the press release).
• On the 4^th of March YouTube announced that all YouTube users are now offered an auto-captions function to make their videos accessible to visitors with hearing impairments (read the blog article).

Concurrently the Government has officially endorsed WCAG 2.0. According to a media release issued on the 23^rd of February, all government websites must adhere to WCAG 2.0 by 2015. More specifically, government agencies have two years to ensure that their website comply against Level A success criteria, and four years to reach the Level AA conformance.

UsabilityOne has been using WCAG 2.0 to identify accessibility issues of clients’ websites for over a year. Very frequently we hear our clients suggesting that the WCAG 2.0 seem hard to understand and full of technical jargon.

The most important thing to understand about WCAG 2.0, is that their ultimate goal is to ensure a website can be accessed by any user regardless of physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities. To check whether your website is accessible to anyone you do not actually need a deep knowledge of any guideline. Rather, you simply need to put yourself in disabled users’ shoes:

• Cover your eyes and listen to the website content through a screen reader like Jaws (a 40 minutes demo mode can be downloaded for free from the Freedom Scientific website). Can you understand how the content is organised on the page? Can you navigate to a page of interest? Are the key messages being communicated effectively?
• Get rid of your mouse and use the keyboard exclusively to interact with the website. Can you get access to any functionality available on the website? Can you reach any page?
• Mute your computer and check whether this makes any of the website content inaccessible to you.

Performing these basic testing activities presents three important benefits:

• Although you will not be able to spot all accessibility issues, you will realise pretty soon if your website has major barriers to some categories of users.
• You will be more likely to understand the motivations behind some of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and success criteria. For instance, navigating your website content with a screen reader, you will quickly comprehend why the presence of a ‘Skip to main content’ link is so important.
• Compliance against WCAG 2.0 does not guarantee that your website is accessible to all users. Undertaking these tests you may come across extras issues not described by WCAG 2.0.

Although the WCAG 2.0 indeed represent an important and necessary tool to identify and solve accessibility issues, the most basic and efficient way to spot accessibility barriers of your website is putting yourself in disabled users’ shoes. You do not need to be an accessibility expert or web developer to do so and you will be surprised by what you may learn.