Working with WCAG Guidelines: 30 Days of Accessibility Testing

The Ministry of Testing has declared that May should be "30 Days of Accessibility Testing". As in the days of yore when I used to take on these challenges and blog regularly, I'm in the mood to get back to doing that. Therefore, I am looking to write a post every day around this topic and as a way to address each line of their checklist.

With that, let's look at #5 today.

5. Read the 12 guidelines of WCAG 2.0. Write a short post on one of them.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is, as its name implies, a way to make sure that the content on the web is accessible. That means that it deals with ways that the information (text, pictures, sound) can be accessed as well as how that information is actually displayed in the markup and structure of pages.

A full breakdown of the WCAG principles can be seen here. 

Principle 1 states:

Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.

Put simply, there needs to be a way for elements and information to be made available and accessible to users. One example of how I deal with this can be seen in "The Testing Show" podcast. One of the aspects we felt was important while we were developing the idea of the podcast was to be able to make the information in the podcast available to as many people as possible. We decided that making a transcript of the full podcast available would help us meet this principle. This was seen by us as a way to make the podcast available to users who could not hear it, as well as making it possible to review the information when listening to the podcast wasn't entirely practical.

This fits into Guideline 1.2 of WGAG 2.0, which is making alternatives available for time-based media. there are lots of other options, but this calls for a short post, and I'm sticking to the spirit of that request :).

Programming note: I will be away for the weekend, and not likely to have internet access, or at least not reliable access so I will need to double up on posts Monday. See you then :).