Some Important Accessibility Web Development Standards and Guidelines

There is a lot of information about how to make your website accessible. Here are some of the main standards that inform Australia’s web accessibility requirements.

The Web Accessibility Initiative’s (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

Are the main international standards for web accessibility. They are based on four main principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. User’s must be able know that content is there and be able to interact with it. WAI provide guidelines on how to make websites accessible for people with disabilities and difficulties, including visual, hearing, physical, cognitive, speech, language, learning, and neurological impairments. Websites in Australia are required to meet at least the AA rating.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) 1.2

ARIA are standards that help make websites and web applications more accessible to people that use assistive technologies, like screen readers. ARIA adds additional information in the HTML code so assistive technologies can understand what is happening on the website. For example ARIA can tell a screen reader if a menu is expanded or collapsed. Good practice means using semantic HTML and only adding ARIA tags when necessary. Incorrectly using ARIA can make using websites harder so should be used carefully. The standards define ARIA roles, states, and properties that improve accessibility.

ARIA in HTML

Standards that explain how ARIA should be used with correctly with HTML, when its should be used and when it shouldn’t.

Accessible Name and Description Computation 1.1

Browsers and platforms have different rules for how they interact with assistive technologies. Accessible Name and Description Computation standardises how content attributes are processed, to reduce unpredictable behaviours across different browsers and platforms. It helps browsers compute the priority in a specific order so it knows what text is to be spoken, where the text comes from and what to ignore. For example with the following code:

<button aria-label="Close Menu">X</button>

A screen reader will prioritise announcing the label “Close Menu button” and ignore the “X” which would still be displayed on the the webpage.

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0

These guidelines are aimed at developers of content management systems, editors, and authoring tools to make sure that the tools themselves are accessible and create accessible content.

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Guidelines for browsers, media players, and other software that interacts with web content for a user to improve accessibility.

Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.1

Standardises automated testing to improve consistency across different accessibility testing tools.

EPUB Accessibility 1.1

The accessibility requirements for digital publications and electronic publication content.

You can find out more information about these standards and more at W3C standards and drafts | W3C