When thinking about digital accessibility, most people could tell you the basics: a readable typeface in a large size, colours with good contrast, easy navigation, and alt text. Sadly, these aspects only really scratch the surface of a much more complex set of accessibility standards that must be met to ensure a website is fully accessible.
What’s WCAG?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are said standards. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), basically the people who write the global guidelines for the web, it is software documentation that acts as the accessibility Bible for web developers.
The key principles are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. WCAG takes into account a wide variety of accessibility needs and outlines how web technologies can be applied to address them, such as using motion or adjustable window widths. The idea is that if a website is fully compliant with WCAG, it will be in the best position to likely be completely digitally accessible to all users.
Saying that, there are some pieces of best practice that are not covered in WCAG, but the guidance is constantly under review and is updated to reflect new technologies. Currently, the newest guidance is WCAG 2.2 which released in October 2023, but very few websites are fully compliant with this as it takes a lot of time and tweaking from skilled web developers to achieve.
With an evolving web landscape, the WCAG guidance will continue to adapt and improve, requiring talented software developers who are skilled in accessibility to build websites that are fully compliant.
Jamescape’s journey into WCAG
Last year at our annual company conference, we held an accessibility workshop where we blindfolded Alfie Jones, our Chief Technology Officer, tasking him to navigate our company website using screen-reader software. Despite building the website with accessibility in mind, and following general good design considerations, many sections of the website including key functionality were inaccessible. We saw the true value of the WCAG guidelines and realised just how complex web accessibility is. As a team we believe that accessibility should not be an after-thought, so we’ve begun working on becoming WCAG 2.2 compliant with all of our products as a long-term goal.
If you’d like some help with improving the accessibility of your organisation’s website, please get in touch and we’d be happy to help out.