While accessibility isn’t the primary responsibility of user experience professionals, it is certainly an area that all members of an organization need to be involved. Making digital assets accessible doesn’t just fall to one person or team. Everyone in the organization should have a high-level understanding of accessibility, and you should make sure each team has ownership over the accessibility of their work.
Recently, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group shared a pending update of the WCAG Guidelines, the industry standard for building accessible experiences, which inform our work on accessibility.
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and they are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The guidelines are meant to help ensure that web interfaces are as accessible as possible.
In 1999, the W3C released the WCAG 1.0 guidelines. These 14 guidelines soon became accepted across the industry since they were focused and mechanical in nature. For example, Checkpoint 1.2.2 stated that audio and video content must have a text alternative, such as a transcript or captions for a video. In addition, they specified different priority levels of conformance (e.g., what someone must do, should do, and may do).
In 2008, they published the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, which built upon and extended the 1.0 guidelines. The 2.0 guidelines categorized 12 guidelines according to the newly introduced P.OU.R. principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust). In addition, the 2.0 guidelines introduced a new three-level conformance model (A, AA, and AAA).
Each level is progressively harder to achieve. If the site is failing to meet an A level standard, it is falling to meet the minimum requirements for accessibility standards.
For example, when a website uses a color scheme that is difficult for people with color blindness to distinguish,
In 2018, these guidelines were updated to the current set known as WCAG 2.1.
For the past few years, international efforts have been made by both individuals and organizations to continue building upon the earlier work of the 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 guidelines.
The new 2.2 guidelines are expected to be published in 2023 Q3 and a draft is now available for review. Some of the proposed changes include:
For each of the guidelines and success criteria, new techniques are being included. These techniques go beyond the success criteria and some mention accessibility obstacles that are not included in the testable success criteria.
The new guidelines also seek to make gains for three key groups: users with cognitive or learning disabilities, users with low vision, and users with disabilities on mobile devices.
Some new areas include:
Overall, this new release appears to be minimal in terms of changes from the current version. However, the WCAG guidelines are the internationally accepted standard that all digital assets must adhere to, so familiarizing yourself with the changes and new criteria is vital.
As UX professionals, it’s important we dive deeper into the WCAG guidelines and stay up to date with the latest updates. Even if accessibility isn’t one of the main purviews of our role, we should do what we can to ensure that the digital assets that we work on are as accessible as possible.
If you regularly conduct accessibility heuristic evaluations or reviews, make sure you study these updated WCAG 2.2. guidelines carefully. While the recent changes likely do not warrant a completely new accessibility heuristic review, it's important to incorporate these updated standards into your regular heuristics and accessibility testing moving forward.
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