Website Content Accessibility Guidelines Reference

Website Content Accessibility Guidelines

WCAG 2.0 Compliance

As a non-profit organization with 50+ employees in Ontario, we must make new and significantly refreshed public websites accessible by law.

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Guideline Overviews

The following are brief overviews of each of the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) identified by the Government of Ontario in which Tyndale must comply at either Level A or Level AA. Please follow the links for more detailed information. Please note that there are specific Success Criterion in each of these guidelines that must be met. This content is intended for reference only.

Guideline 1.1: Provide text alternatives for non-text content

The purpose of this guideline is to ensure that all non-text content is also available in text. “Text” refers to electronic text, not an image of text. Electronic text has the unique advantage that it is presentation neutral. That is, it can be rendered visually, auditorily, tactilely, or by any combination. As a result, information rendered in electronic text can be presented in whatever form best meets the needs of the user. It can also be easily enlarged, spoken aloud so that it is easier for people with reading disabilities to understand, or rendered in whatever tactile form best meets the needs of a user.

Guideline 1.2: Provide alternatives for time-based media

The purpose of this guideline is to provide access to time-based and synchronized media.This includes media that is: audio-only, video-only, audio-video or audio and/or video combined with interaction.

Guideline 1.3: Adaptable content

The purpose of this guideline is to ensure that all information is available in a form that can be perceived by all users, for example, spoken aloud, or presented in a simpler visual layout. If all of the information is available in a form that can be determined by software, then it can be presented to users in different ways (visually, audibly, tactilely etc.). If information is embedded in a particular presentation in such a way that the structure and information cannot be programmatically determined by the assistive technology, then it cannot be rendered in other formats as needed by the user.

Guideline 1.4: Distinguishable content

While some guidelines are focused on making information available in a form that can be presented in alternate formats, this guideline is concerned with making the default presentation as easy to perceive as possible to people with disabilities. The primary focus is on making it easier for users to separate foreground information from the background.

Guideline 2.1: Keyboard accessible

If all functionality can be achieved using the keyboard, it can be accomplished by keyboard users, by speech input (which creates keyboard input), by mouse (using on-screen keyboards), and by a wide variety of assistive technologies that create simulated keystrokes as their output.

Guideline 2.2: Provide users enough time to read and use content

Many users who have disabilities need more time to complete tasks than the majority of users: they may take longer to physically respond, they may take longer to read things, they may have low vision and take longer to find things or to read them, or they may be accessing content through an assistive technology that requires more time.

Guideline 2.3: Don’t design content in a way that is known to cause seizures

Some people with seizure disorders can have a seizure triggered by flashing visual content. Most people are unaware that they have this disorder until it strikes. In 1997, a cartoon on television in Japan sent over 700 children to the hospital, including about 500 who had seizures. Warnings do not work well because they are often missed, especially by children who may in fact not be able to read them.

Guideline 2.4: Navigable content

The intent of this guideline is to help users find the content they need and allow them to keep track of their location. These tasks are often more difficult for people with disabilities. For finding, navigation, and orientation, it is important that the user can find out what the current location is. For navigation, information about the possible destinations needs to be available. Screen readers convert content to synthetic speech which, because it is audio, must be presented in linear order. Some Success Criteria in this guideline explain what provisions need to be taken to ensure that screen reader users can successfully navigate the content.

Guideline 3.1: Readable text content

The intent of this guideline is to allow text content to be read by users and by assistive technology, and to ensure that information necessary for understanding it is available.

Guideline 3.2: Predictable web pages

The intent of this Guideline is to help users with disabilities by presenting content in a predictable order from Web page to Web page and by making the behavior of functional and interactive components predictable. It is difficult for some users to form an overview of the Web page: screen readers present content as a one-dimensional stream of synthetic speech that makes it difficult to understand spatial relationships. Users with cognitive limitations may become confused if components appear in different places on different pages.

Guideline 3.3: Input assistance

Everyone makes mistakes. However, people with some disabilities have more difficulty creating error-free input. In addition, it may be harder for them to detect that they have made an error. Typical error indication methods may not be obvious to them because of a limited field of view, limited color perception, or use of assistive technology. This guideline seeks to reduce the number of serious or irreversible errors that are made, increase the likelihood that all errors will be noticed by the user, and help users understand what they should do to correct an error.

Guideline 4.1: Compatible

The purpose of this guideline is to support compatibility with current and future user agents, especially assistive technologies (AT). This is done both by 1) ensuring that authors do not do things that would break AT (e.g., poorly formed markup) or circumvent AT (e.g., by using unconventional markup or code) and 2) exposing information in the content in standard ways that assistive technologies can recognize and interact with. Since technologies change quickly, and AT developers have much trouble keeping up with rapidly changing technologies, it is important that content follow conventions and be compatible with APIs so that AT can more easily work with new technologies as they evolve.

Please note: the above content includes snippets from the Understanding WCAG 2.0 website and is provided here as a reference for the Tyndale community developing website content.