14 January 2003

Appendix H: Accessibility Support


Contents

This appendix is informative, not normative.

H.1 WAI Accessibility Guidelines

This appendix explains how accessibility guidelines published by W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) apply to SVG.

  1. The "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [WCAG] explains how authors can create Web content that is accessible to people with disabilities.
  2. The "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [ATAG] explains how developers can design accessible authoring tools such as SVG authoring tools. To conform to the SVG specification, an SVG authoring tool must conform to ATAG (priority 1). SVG support for element grouping and reuse is relevant to designing accessible SVG authoring tools.
  3. The "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" [UAAG] explains how developers can design accessible user agents such as SVG-enabled browsers. To conform to the SVG specification, an SVG user agent should conform to UAAG. SVG support for scaling, style sheets, the DOM, and metadata are all relevant to designing accessible SVG user agents.

The W3C Note "Accessibility Features of SVG" [SVG-ACCESS] explains in detail how the requirements of the three guidelines apply to SVG.


H.2 SVG Content Accessibility Guidelines

This section explains briefly how authors can create accessible SVG documents; it summarizes "Accessibility Features of SVG" [SVG-ACCESS].

Provide text equivalents for graphics.
Do not rely on color alone.
Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.
Clarify natural language usage.
Ensure that dynamic content is accessible.