Abstract
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of issues and recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This document contains principles, guidelines, success criteria, benefits, and examples that define and explain the requirements for making Web-based information and applications accessible. "Accessible" means usable to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, and others. Following these guidelines will also make your Web content more accessible to the vast majority of users, including older users. It will also enable people to access Web content using many different devices - including a wide variety of assistive technologies.
WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria are provided in separate documents. An Overview of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Last Call Documents is also available.
Until WCAG 2.0 advances to W3C Recommendation, the current and referenceable document is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0), published as a W3C Recommendation May 1999.
Status of this Document
This document is for review by the WCAG WG and is subject to change without notice. This document has no formal standing within W3C. Please consult the group's home page and the W3C technical reports index for information about the latest publications by this group.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This @@ April 2006 release of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 is a Last Call Working Draft by theWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (part of the Web Accessibility Initiative) for review by W3C Members and other interested parties. Since the 23 November 2005 WCAG 2.0 draft, the working group has focused on addressing comments received on previous drafts and on the development of techniques and support information for the guidelines.
Please send your comments by @@ May 2006 to public-comments-wcag20@w3.org. The archives for this list are publicly available. Archives of the WCAG WG mailing list discussions are also publicly available.
This document addresses all the open issues against the previous Working Draft. For a detailed list of changes since the last publication of this document, please refer to the History of Changes to WCAG 2.0 Working Drafts.
The WCAG 2.0 Guidelines are accompanied by a number of Technical Report working drafts that provide support information for the guidelines to facilitate their application. The first is Understanding WCAG 2.0, which provides information to help better understand the various parts of the guidelines as well as information on how to meet each of the WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria. The Technical Report working drafts also include Techniques documents for various Web technologies. See introduction below for a complete description of the documents. Comments are also sought on how to make these documents more useful in supporting WCAG 2.0.
Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. The Working Group maintains a public list of patent disclosures relevant to this document; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) with respect to this specification should disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.