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a11y

All credit to https://testingaccessibility.com/

Tools​

Terminology​

  • User Agent A user agent or UA string is a line of text identifying the browser and operating system to the web server. User agents provide default CSS styles and other functionality. Example: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.88 Safari/537.36

  • Assistive Technology AT refers to hardware and/or software that provides functionality to meet the requirements of users with disabilities that go beyond those offered by mainstream user agents. Examples: screen readers, braille displays, magnifiers, text-to-speech, speech recognition, alternate keyboards (switches, sip & puff, etc.)

  • WCAG applies to Native Mobile

  • W3C The World Wide Web Consortium is an international standards body that develops and maintains web guidelines and protocols. The public can participate in discussions on GitHub, while Working Groups who make decisions are limited to W3C members and invited parties. Standards: HTML, CSS, SVG, WCAG, XML, HTTP, and many APIs.

  • WHATWG The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is a different community working on HTML and related technologies. Since 2019, W3C and WHATWG have committed to working on a single HTML standard instead of previously competing standards.

  • WCAG The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C. The guidelines are grouped into four categories: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Many laws around the world invoke WCAG as a standard to follow. Currently on version 2.1, with version 2.2 due out sometime in late 2022. A complete rethink of WCAG, called Silver or version 3.0, will land sometime in the distant future.

  • ARIA The Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification, a.k.a. WAI-ARIA comes from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. It includes a standard set of roles, states, and properties that provide accessibility information in web pages and apps. Currently on version 1.1.

  • Normative Official and approved wording in a specification; holds up in a court of law. In contrast to non-normative, or an informative aid that is often used in explanations or tutorials. Example: “The main content of WCAG 2.1 is normative and defines requirements that impact conformance claims.”

  • Conformance Conformance to a standard means that you meet or satisfy the “requirements” of the standard. A.k.a. “compliance”. Example: “In WCAG 2.1 the ‘requirements’ are the Success Criteria. To conform to WCAG 2.1, you need to satisfy the Success Criteria, that is, there is no content which violates the Success Criteria.”

Resources​