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, and success criteria 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, photosensitivity and combinations of these. 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 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/.
The W3C strongly encourages broad community review of this Last Call Working Draft, and submission of comments on any issues which you feel could present a significant barrier to future adoption and implementation of WCAG 2.0. In particular, we encourage you to comment on the success criteria and the conformance model. Reviewers are encouraged to provide suggestions for how to address issues as well as supportive feedback and endorsements of the document.
This 27 April 2006 release of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 is a Last Call Working Draft by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (part of the Web Accessibility Initiative). Publication as a Last Call Working Draft indicates that the WCAG WG believes it has addressed all substantive issues and that the document is stable. The first public Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 was published 25 January 2001. Since then, the WCAG WG has published nine Working Drafts, addressed more than 1,000 issues, and developed a variety of support information for the guidelines. This publication of WCAG 2.0 is accompanied by the following documents:
-
Understanding WCAG 2.0 - which provides information about
each Guideline as well as describing how to meet each Success Criteria.
-
Techniques for WCAG 2.0 - which includes sufficient
techniques for each success criteria for various Web technologies including
HTML, CSS, SMIL and scripting.
After Last Call, the WCAG WG believes that WCAG 2.0 will be ready to
move on to the remaining stages of the W3C Recommendation Track Process:
-
Candidate Recommendation - collect implementation experience
on use of WCAG 2.0 to design and evaluate Web content for accessibility;
-
Proposed Recommendation - seek endorsement of the
specification from W3C Member organizations;
-
Recommendation - published by W3C as a technical report
appropriate for widespread deployment and the promotion of W3C's mission.
Comments on this working draft are due on or before 31 May 2006. To comment, please use one of the following standard response formats.
-
Web form
-
HTML file
-
Excel spreadsheet
-
Email form
Instructions and downloads for all are available at http:///www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/comments/. Please send completed forms to public-comments-wcag20@w3.org.
The archives for the public comments list are publicly available. Archives of the WCAG WG mailing list discussions are also publicly available.
We are starting to gather implementation examples during this Last
Call review process. Implementation examples are examples of pages or sites
that conform to the proposed WCAG 2.0 at various levels of conformance.
This Last Call draft of WCAG 2.0 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.
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 by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; 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) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.