WAI Resources

A complete list of pages is in the WAI site map.

WAI Home

Accessibility Fundamentals

The following resources provide information for getting started with accessibility:

Introduction to Web Accessibility
Introduces web accessibility and links to additional resources. Includes accessibility in context; why accessibility is important for individuals, businesses, society; making digital technology accessible; evaluating accessibility; and basic examples.
Accessibility: It’s About People
Explains the people aspect of accessibility and the role of accessibility in diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI). Links to:
Essential Components of Web Accessibility
Shows how web accessibility depends on several components of web development and interaction working together and shows the relationship between the WAI guidelines and other standards.
Accessibility Principles
A concise introduction to accessibility requirements for websites, apps, browsers, and other tools. It is organized similar to the WAI accessibility standards and provides a useful bridge to the standards. Read this page before reading the standards/guidelines.
Digital Accessibility Courses:

Planning & Policies

Planning and Managing Accessibility

The following resources provide guidance for individual project management and for managing accessibility throughout an organization.

Web Accessibility First Aid: Approaches for Interim Repairs
Provides a concise overview with pointers to address the most critical issues. Helps with the situation: “I need to make my website accessible and I don’t even know where to start!”
Planning and Managing Web Accessibility
Describes activities to help you integrate accessibility throughout your organization and projects.
Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility
Describes how project managers, designers, and developers can better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions.

Law and Policy Resources

The resources below help you find existing laws and policies, and develop a policy for your organization.

Web Accessibility Laws and Policies
Lists governmental laws and policies relating to web accessibility in countries and regions around the world.
Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility
Describes considerations when making simple or comprehensive policies for creating, managing, and delivering accessible websites.
Developing an Accessibility Statement
Helps you create an accessibility statement for your own website, mobile application, or other digital content.

Design & Develop

Tips for Getting Started with Web Accessibility

These tips introduce some basic considerations for making your website more accessible to people with disabilities. They provide links to additional guidance.

Writing for Web Accessibility
Tips for writing and presenting content.
Designing for Web Accessibility
Tips for user interface and visual design.
Developing for Web Accessibility
Tips for markup and coding.

Media Resource for Audio and Video

Making Audio and Video Media Accessible
Helps you understand and create captions/subtitles, audio description of visual information, descriptive transcripts, and sign language for media. Includes guidance for creating new videos, and on media player accessibility. Introduces user experiences and benefits to organizations.

Web Accessibility Tutorials

The tutorials provide guidance on how to create components that meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), that are more accessible to people with disabilities, and that provide a better user experience for everyone.

Other Design and Development Resources

How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference)
A customizable reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements (“success criteria”) and techniques.
WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices
Provides approaches, advice, and examples to help web application developers make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible using WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles, states, and properties.
Cognitive Accessibility Guidance
Provides objectives and design patterns to improve accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. Introduced in About Supplemental Guidance.
Developing Websites for Older People: How WCAG Applies
Lists specific WCAG success criteria and techniques that particularly improve accessibility and usability for older people.

Test & Evaluate

For videos introducing the evalution resources below, go to Evaluating Web Accessibility Overview.

When developing or redesigning a website or web application, evaluate accessibility early and throughout the development process to identify accessibility problems early, when it is easier to address them.

There are evaluation tools that help with evaluation. However, no tool alone can determine if a site meets accessibility standards. Knowledgeable human evaluation is required to determine if a site is accessible.

Initial Checks

This video is available with more accessibility features: Video: Easy Checks Overview.

Even if you don’t know anything about accessibility and you don’t have a robust accessibility tool, you can check some aspects of accessibility.

Easy Checks — A First Review of Web Accessibility
Provides step-by-step guidance and brief explanations for checking some aspects of accessibility.

Tools

This video is available with more accessibility features: Video: Evaluation Tools Overview.

Web accessibility evaluation tools are software programs or online services that help determine if web content meets accessibility standards.

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
Includes information on evaluation tools. You can use the filters to narrow down the list to the types of tools you are interested in.
Selecting Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools
Provides guidance on choosing tools. It describes the features and functionality of different types of evaluation tools, and discusses things to consider for your situation.

Conformance Evaluation and Reports

This video is available with more accessibility features: Video: Conformance Evaluation Overview.

Conformance evaluation determines how well web pages or applications meet accessibility standards. W3C’s Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) is an approach for determining conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

WCAG-EM Overview: Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology
A short page with basic information to get you started. We suggest you read it before going to the full WCAG-EM document.
WCAG-EM Report Tool: Website Accessibility Evaluation Report Generator
Helps you generate evaluation reports according to WCAG-EM. It does not do the checking for you. It helps you follow the steps of WCAG-EM and it generates a report from the input you provide.
Template for Web Accessibility Evaluation Reports
Suggests information to include in a report.
ATAG Report Tool
Helps you generate a report on how a tool meets Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). Authoring tools are software and services used to create web content – such as content management systems (CMS) and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) HTML editors.

Communicate the results of evaluation clearly, including the scope of the evaluation.

For Developers of Test Tools and Methodologies

WCAG 2 Test Rules
Describe how to test conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criteria. They are primarily for developers of test tools and methodologies.

Specifications for expressing test results (EARL) and for writing accessibility test rules (Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format) are introduced in Evaluation Standards Overview.

People

This video is available with more accessibility features: Video: Involving Users in Web Accessibility Overview.

Getting the right people and skills involved makes your accessibility evaluations more effective.

Using Combined Expertise to Evaluate Web Accessibility
Discusses skill sets and considerations for collaborative review.
Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility
Provides guidance on including people with disabilities (“users”) in evaluation throughout project development.

Teach & Advocate

Training Resources

Making Events Accessible - Checklist for meetings, conferences, training, and presentations that are remote/virtual, in-person, or hybrid
Helps you make presentations, talks, meetings, and training accessible to all of your potential audience, including people with disabilities and others.
Curricula on Web Accessibility: A Framework to Build Your Own Courses
Provides curricula to help you create courses on web accessibility for different roles. It defines learning outcomes, and provides ideas to teach and assess knowledge. The curriculum “Introduction to Web Accessibility” is currently available. Additional curriculum will be available in 2020 and 2021.
Developing Web Accessibility Presentations and Training
Provides materials for speakers, lecturers, educators and other presenters to help their participants understand more about web accessibility. The materials provide a range of information from introductory slides for those new to accessibility, to statistics and demos for experienced trainers. (Note: This content is mostly from 2013. The Curricula links to more recent resources.]
Before and After Demonstration (BAD)
Shows an inaccessible website and a retrofitted version of the same website. Includes annotations that highlight key accessibility barriers and repairs, and evaluation reports for WCAG 2.0.

Advocating Resources

Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites
Encourages telling organizations about accessibility barriers on their website. Provides guidance on identifying key contacts, describing the problem, and following up as needed. Includes tips and sample e-mails.
The Business Case for Digital Accessibility
Examines the rationale for organizations to address accessibility. Includes tangible and intangible benefits, and the risks of not addressing accessibility adequately. Explores how accessibility can drive innovation, enhance your brand, extend market reach, and minimize legal risk.

Standards/Guidelines

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops international Web standards: HTML, CSS, and many more. W3C’s Web standards are called W3C Recommendations.

All W3C standards are reviewed for accessibility support by the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group.

The W3C standards and Working Group Notes introduced below are particularly relevant to accessibility.

Accessibility Guidelines

Essential Components of Web Accessibility shows how web accessibility depends on several components of web development and interaction working together, and how the WAI guidelines (WCAG, ATAG, UAAG) apply.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2

Web “content” generally refers to the information in a web page or web application, including:

  • natural information such as text, images, and sounds
  • code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.

WCAG 2 applies to dynamic content, multimedia, “mobile”, etc. WCAG can also be applied to non-web information and communications technologies (ICT), as described in WCAG2ICT.

WCAG 2 info:

W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3 Working Draft

WCAG 3 is an incomplete, early draft that is intended to become a W3C Standard. WCAG 3 applies to web content, apps, tools, publishing, and emerging technologies on the web.

WCAG 3 info:

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

Authoring tools are software and services that “authors” (web developers, designers, writers, etc.) use to produce web content. For example: HTML editors, content management systems (CMS), and websites that let users add content, such as blogs and social networking sites. ATAG documents explain how to:

  • make the authoring tools themselves accessible, so that people with disabilities can create web content, and
  • help authors create more accessible web content.

ATAG info:

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)

User agents include browsers, browser extensions, media players, readers, and other applications that render web content.

UAAG info:

Technical Specifications

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)

ARIA provides semantics so authors can convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies (such as screen readers). The ARIA specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements.

The ARIA suite includes API mapping specifications that provide user agent implementation guidance. It also include modules for Graphics and Digital Publishing.

ARIA info:

Audio and Video

Evaluation

The following resources support development of accessibility evaluation methods and tools:

Additional resources related to evaluation are listed in the Evaluating Web Accessibility Overview, including:

Personalization

Personalization Overview — Personalization involves tailoring the user experience to meet the needs and preferences of the individual user. Content authors can use personalization standards to provide a default design and enable user personalization with minimal work.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation Overview — Pronunciation is about screen readers and other text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis pronouncing content properly.

Cognitive Accessibility and Mobile Accessibility at W3C

Additional Standards Information

illustration showing the guidelines for the different components, detailed description at https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/components-desc.html#guide

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