In our last blog post we covered POUR, the four guiding principles for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that provide the basis for web accessibility.
Each of the WCAG principles has its own guidelines, then within each of the guidelines we have the success criteria. For example, Perceivable's first guideline is Text Alternatives, and under that we have a number of success criteria on how to meet the guideline, e.g., providing text alternatives for images for people who cannot see them.
The success criteria are the core of WCAG. They are detailed standards which set out how we can test a website's accessibility conformance. There are a total 87 success criteria in WCAG 2.2, which is the latest version of WCAG.
The success criteria are broken into three conformance levels
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Level A (the minimum level):
- There are 32 level A success criteria. These are the minimum requirements that must be met for a website to be considered accessible. They address major issues that significantly impact users with disabilities.
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Level AA (the recommended level):
- Meeting Level AA criteria involves meeting Level A criteria, with an additional 24 criteria. This level enhances accessibility on a website and provides a better user experience for a broader range of people.
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Level AAA (the nice to have level):
- This is the highest level of conformance. Achieving Level AAA involves meeting both Level A and AA requirements and 31 additional success criteria. The additional criteria can be quite challenging to meet.
Most accessibility laws, such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in the United States and EN 301 549 in Europe require WCAG Level AA conformance. For our series of blogs we are going to focus on the 56 success criteria that fall under WCAG 2.2 AA only.
WCAG documentation on the success criteria can be quite technical and complex so our goal is to try and make them as easy to understand as possible by providing examples of issues, explaining why they are issues, and providing guidance as to how they can be addressed.
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