August 2008
Get Started with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0
By Henny Swan, Senior Web Accessibility Consultant, RNIB
- Overview of WCAG 2.0
This introduces the WCAG 2.0 suite of documents that support the normative WCAG 2.0 document. If you want to understand how all the documents relate to each other this is the place to start.
- How to meet WCAG 2.0
This is a great tool if you are listing what WCAG 2.0 guidelines and success criteria (formally checkpoints under WCAG 1.0) are relevant to your Website. Using the form on the page you can customise the contents based on whether you are using CSS, multimedia, SMIL, JavaScript or ARIA. You can also only show Level A, AA, or AAA success criteria depending on your chosen level of conformance as well as choose to show or hide techniques and advisory techniques.
- Understanding WCAG 2.0
This document groups WCAG success criteria one by one. Each page provides information on the purpose of the success criterion, examples, resources, techniques, common failures and key terms. This is great if you want to focus on one topic area, learn whom it affects and proposed solutions.
- Comparison of WCAG 1.0 to 2.0
If you've been working with WCAG 1.0 you will want to know what is new in WCAG 2.0, updated, removed or the same. This document maps the two versions as well as flags the differences.
There are a number of clear benefits for the Website owner, designer and developer using WCAG 2.0 rather than WCAG 1.0.
Testable: The success criteria are written in such a way that they are testable statements unlike WCAG 1.0. For example where WCAG 1.0 Checkpoint 2.2 said "Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast...", WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria 1.4.1 says "Text or diagrams, and their background, have a luminosity contrast ratio of at least 5:1.". This makes it much easier to test and less open to interpretation.
Support of Non-W3C Technology: unlike WCAG 1.0, 2.0 is written for all technologies not just W3C technologies. This means WCAG can be used with Flash, PDF, Silverlight and so on.
More Supporting Documentation: the supporting documentation for WCAG contains more examples, explanation of techniques, rationale of how issues affect the users and common failures to avoid.
Updatable Techniques: As new techniques are developed over time by the Web community these can be submitted to WAI for inclusion in the techniques document.