WCAG History

The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) were around long before the regulations. The first set WCAG 1.0 were published in 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and since then have been used by designers, evaluators and legislators as the set of accepted guidelines for web accessibility  (Alonso et al, 2010; 2010b; W3C, 1999). The have have become the web standard for accessibility both in the UK and many countries internationally. 

It took several years for them to be updated, with WCAG 2.0 being published in December 2008 (W3C, 2008). The core difference of the update was that WCAG 2.0 had two main goals. Firstly is was developed to be technology-independent so it could be applicable to both current and future technologies, and secondly it had testable criteria so practitioners had a way to agree about it evaluating conformance of a website (Alonso et al, 2010; Al-Khalifa and Al-Khalifa, 2011). WCAG 2.0 also had several layers of guidance. It organised 61 testable success criteria into four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (POUR). Each of the 61 criteria were further categorised into levels of A (lowest), AA and AAA (highest) to measure accessibility conformance in a much more specific way (Alonso et al, 2010b).

To supplement the WCAG 2.0 guidelines was also an external document called ‘Techniques’. This document was broken down into three types of techniques: Sufficient Technique, Advisory Technique and Common Failures that provided implementation methods for being able to address the WCAG success criteria (Al-Khalifa and Al-Khalifa, 2011; W3C, 2023). Further updates followed with WCAG 2.1 published on 5 June 2018, this provided an additional 17 success criteria to address mobile accessibility, people with low vision people with cognitive and learning disabilities (W3C, 2018). The most recent update of WCAG 2.2 is scheduled to be finalized and released in 2023 (WC3, 2023b).

Later in teaching literature bit: 

Title: ‘The web content accessibility guidelines as a teaching tool’

Papers:

  • Alonso et al 2010
  • Alonso et al 2010b
  • Al-Khalifa and Al-Khalifa, 2011
  • Abuaddous, Jali and Basir, 2016


W3C, 1999

 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

W3C, 2008

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

W3C, 2018

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

W3C, 2023

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/understanding-techniques

W3C, 2023b

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/

Extra doc to take info from:

https://oarep.usim.edu.my/jspui/bitstream/123456789/8393/1/Web%20Accessibility%20Challenges.pdf

Abuaddous, H.Y., Jali, M.Z. and Basir, N. (2016) Web accessibility challenges. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA).

Abuaddous, Jali and Basir (2016)

(Abuaddous, Jali and Basir, 2016)

How can we educate our next generation to be digitally inclusive?

Aims:

Teach Access website quote:

What we have are a few people who know a lot about Accessibility. What we need are a lot of people to know a little about it.

– Matt May (Adobe)

Wilson (2020; 2023) quote:

We need simple and engaging guidance to make ‘accessibility accessible’ so it can become everyone’s responsibility as future citizens in a digital world.

AbilityNet?

Find a ‘make awareness mainstream’ and integrated into the curriculum quote at ‘scale’.



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