Accessibility in practice
A guide fixes one failure. These pages answer the questions around the fixes: what the standards ask, how a site is tested, what to fix first, and what to ask a vendor.
What the standards ask
- What in WCAG is required, and what is only advice
How WCAG is built, from its principles down to its techniques, which parts a page can fail, and what each version from 2.0 to 2.2 changed.
- What it takes for a page to conform to WCAG
WCAG's five conformance requirements, the four criteria that apply to everything on a page, conforming alternate versions, and what a site can claim.
- What EN 301 549 asks of a website beyond WCAG
Clause 9 of EN 301 549 V3.2.1 is WCAG 2.1 A and AA; Table A.1 adds 42 rows from clauses 5, 6, 7, 11 and 12, each applying when its condition holds.
- What a CMS or editor owes the people who write in it
ATAG 2.0, EN 301 549 11.8 and Section 508 504 ask an authoring tool to work for authors with disabilities and to help every author publish accessible content.
How a page reaches assistive technology
- What a screen reader gets from your HTML and ARIA
How the browser turns HTML and ARIA into the accessibility tree a screen reader reads, and where each role, name, description and state in it comes from.
- Arrow keys inside a widget: roving tabindex or aria-activedescendant
How a tab list, toolbar, listbox or grid takes one Tab stop and moves with the arrow keys, by a roving tabindex or by aria-activedescendant, and when each one fits.
- Whether a technique works in the screen readers people use
What WCAG means by accessibility supported, which screen reader and browser pairs to test, and how to tell a flaw in the code from a gap in support.
- How people use the web with assistive technology
How people move through a page with screen readers, magnifiers, reading tools, speech recognition, switches, eye gaze and the keyboard, and what each needs from it.
Testing, fixing and buying
- Testing a whole site against WCAG, and standing behind the result
How WCAG-EM's five steps scope, explore, sample, evaluate and report a site, where a fixed test process such as Trusted Tester fits, and what the report has to state.
- What testing with disabled people finds that an audit doesn't
Why a page can pass WCAG and still be hard to use, and how to test real tasks with disabled people at each stage of a project, recruited across groups and paid fairly.
- Who does what, and when, so accessibility isn't left to the end
How to plan accessibility into a web project, build it into the design system's components first, test it in every cycle, share the work across roles from management to content authors, and keep it after launch.
- Which findings to fix first, and when to rebuild instead
How to order an audit's findings by what each does to a task, whom it reaches, where it sits and what the fix costs, when to fix and when to rebuild, and how to write a finding a developer can act on.
- Reading a vendor's VPAT before you buy, and what to ask next
What an ACR built on the VPAT template tells a buyer, what its five conformance terms mean, the signs a report can't be relied on, what to ask in a tender, and how to reduce the risk once you buy.