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The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is internationally recognised as the standards body for web publishing. They have a Web Accessibility Initiative project that has been focusing on how web sites can be made more accessible for people with a variety of disabilities. One outcome of the project is a set of Guidelines, Checkpoints and Techniques for ensuring an accessible web site.

The guidelines and checkpoints are explained below, but you don't need to learn it all. This is a lot of information to master, and as a result various tools have emerged to help you achieve compliance the the Guidelines. The University has bought a site licence for LIFT for Dreamweaver. See the next page for some instructions and examples to help you use it.

The guidelines

The guidelines are broad objectives. There are 14 guidelines that are based on the following two broad themes:

1. Ensuring that pages transform gracefully when accessed using alternative, or older browser technologies (guidelines 1-11).
2. Making content understandable and navigable (guidelines 12-14)

These are the guidelines, (my annotations in brackets). For fuller explanations visit the W3C original version:

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content (provide text explanations of pictures and sound or video elements).
2. Don't rely on colour alone.
3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly (use the W3C standards for coding in HTML and CSS).
4. Clarify natural language usage (be explicit about what language your page is in and specify where you change to include other languages).
5. Create tables that transform gracefully (if you use tables for layout, the content should be understandable if the tables are ignored).
6. Ensure pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully (for older browsers).
7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes (users should be able to stop moving text or objects).
8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces (if you've added a built in object with it's own interface - that should be accessible too).
9. Design for device-independence (don't assume users use the mouse).
10. Use interim solutions (until older browsers are no longer used).
11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines.
12. Provide context and orientation information (let the user know where they are in the site).
13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.
14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple.

The checkpoints

Each guideline is accompanied by a number of specific checkpoints which are either identifiable coding issues, or questions to ask of your design. Each checkpoint has been allocated a priority level according to how big an impact it has on accessibility. According to the W3C, we must satisfy Priority 1 checkpoints, we should satisfy Priority 2 checkpoints and we may satisfy Priority 3 checkpoints.

• Satisfying Priority 1 checkpoints means that you have met basic requirements for accessibility, and that you can claim W3C WCAG Level A compliance for your web site.
• Satisfying Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints means that you have removed significant barriers, and that you can claim W3C WCAG Level AA compliance.
• Satisfying Priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints means that you have improved access, and that you can claim W3C WCAG Level AAA compliance for your web site.

The W3C provide a list of all checkpoints arranged by priority.

The techniques

For each checkpoint the W3C have provided a number of techniques which give detailed instructions on satisfying the checkpoint. SEDU & the web team have collaborated to produce a much reduced version of the most common techniques that you may need in a document called IS4004: Accessibility and the Web (446kB).

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Original pages: April 2001 by John Walsh
last updated: 01 January 1970 by Rachel Scudamore