The idea behind the Internet is that it should be available to everyone. Today's Internet represents not only the knowledge gathered by people, but also entire communities. It shapes opinions, lets us learn, grow, and share knowledge and experience with the world. It lets us work and relax. And to think that the first website was created in 1990.

What Is Web Accessibility?

This is the essential question. Practically from the beginning of the 1990s, people tried to create websites in a way that would make them easier to use by different people on different devices. The Internet as a concept is, by its nature, very broad and flexible, which makes it difficult to put into one clear frame.

Web accessibility is a set of principles, a kind of standard made up of guidelines for people creating websites. These guidelines are meant to make a website easier to use on different devices and by different people, with particular attention paid to people with disabilities. It is worth emphasizing that these are fairly broad guidelines. Of course, some of them are technical requirements, but as a rule, if they are supposed to fit many different use cases, they have to remain quite general.

W3C

In 1994, the idea appeared to create an organization responsible for establishing standards for creating and delivering web pages. On October 1, 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which took responsibility for shaping those standards. What matters here is that W3C standards do not have the force of law. They are proposals and guidelines worth following, but there is no general obligation to do so.

Is It Worth Following W3C Recommendations?

Even though W3C recommendations are not hard law, it is worth paying attention to them. At the time of writing, the organization included more than 360 companies, organizations, and entities whose activity was directly connected with the Internet, including IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Facebook, and many others.

In addition, in many countries some recommendations have become binding law. In Poland, for example, this has been true of the WCAG standard since 2012.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

The first WCAG standard was published in 1999. The original standard divided requirements into 3 groups:

• A - this group contained requirements that had to be implemented by the creator for a website to be considered "accessible" at a basic level
• AA - this group contained not only requirements, but also recommendations that should be introduced to increase accessibility
• AAA - the last group, meaning the highest level of accessibility

The 1999 standard was oriented toward technology, which caused more and more difficulties as the world of the Internet kept changing dynamically.

WCAG 2.0

A wave of criticism of the standard forced W3C to change its recommendations. In 2008, a new standard was published, much more detailed than its predecessor. The emphasis moved from classification levels per technology to classification levels per user. The 3 levels remained: A, AA, and AAA. According to the new standards:

• the user interface should be understandable, readable, and presented in an accessible way
• individual user interface elements should allow interaction with the user
• the content and operation of the interface should be understandable
• content should be prepared reliably, so that different devices and the software attached to them can interpret it correctly

2.1

In 2018, an improved and updated version of the WCAG standard was released. The update was published in response to criticism that the existing standard had become outdated.

What and How?

Colors and Sizes

Because accessibility standards also apply to people with different kinds and degrees of disabilities, including people who are blind or have low vision, presentation is a very important part of adapting the view. Applications should maintain proper color contrast and allow the font size to be changed.

This assumption is directly connected with screen size and orientation. Content presentation should take into account that users may work on all kinds of screens. In the age of smartphones, meeting this requirement can be difficult, because the number of available options is huge. Add devices such as smartwatches to that, and we have quite a lot of work.

It is worth noting that horizontal scrolling in an application is a mistake. As a rule, websites are vertically oriented.

Inputs

When creating a web application, we should also take into account different input devices that the user may use. For example, when creating a form, we should make it available or at least predict that the user may want to use a mouse, keyboard, touch screen, and so on. In addition, when describing input elements such as input, we should mark them properly, for example by using the label tag, and use the right attributes, such as autocomplete or type with appropriate values.

The same principles apply to the user's use of gestures.

Text and Media

Websites mostly consist of text and different kinds of media. Apart from classic images, we increasingly find both audio and video materials on them.

Readable text is text with properly set spacing between characters, line height, spacing between paragraphs, and text that is properly marked with paragraph tags p and heading tags h1 - h6. Text should also be arranged according to hierarchy. For example, we should not use h5 directly after h2.

Interactive materials should be marked with the figure element and properly described with the figcaption tag. Videos, sounds, and animations should not start automatically, and the user should always be able to turn them off.

Alt

One thing worth mentioning is the alt attribute, which should always be assigned to images. alt is content that should be made available to the user when they cannot receive the image for various reasons. They may be blind and use a screen reader, or they may be using a text browser.

So what should alt contain? It definitely should not be a single word. It should be a concise description of what the image shows. That is why the popular alt="logo" is not a correct value for the alt attribute. A logo is a visual representation of the name of a company, project, or the values that the company or project represents. It is therefore worth replacing alt="logo" with something like alt="mateuszjablonski.com - Mateusz Jabłoński's private website".

Inform the User and Let Them Make Mistakes

Another group of principles worth implementing in our applications is displaying error messages, validation messages, and informing users about the effects of their actions if those actions can drastically affect the data they are working on. We should always allow an operation to be cancelled.

There are still many principles we should follow. I tried to pull out the ones that, in my opinion, are the most important. In the sources you will find more articles on this topic, and they are worth reading.

Summary

In my opinion, the WCAG standard is something we should absolutely follow. Despite the criticism it still receives, I believe that the idea of making the Internet and its resources accessible is right. In my opinion, we should take care of it. Let us remember that the quality of our code is not only nice indentation, a perfectly structured codebase, or well-organized components. The quality of our work is also shown by whether we pay attention to the end customer who will use what we build. WCAG is not only a designer's concern. WCAG also means a lot of work for the programmer, because the correct implementation of functionality depends on us. We are responsible for what we deliver.