The A11y Path

I had covered this section of the Body of Knowledge earlier in March, and it helped lay the foundation for everything else. Here's a summary of what I learned under Domain 1A specifically sections 1.1 to 1.3 (in the BoK).

Here's what I learned

Why the W3C WAI Created Accessibility Guidelines

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops international standards to make the web accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. Since accessibility involves different moving parts (content, browsers, AT, tools), they've created guidelines for each:

• WCAG - for web content
• ATAG - for authoring tools
• UAAG - for browsers and media players
• WAI-ARIA - to describe roles and states when native HTML isn't enough

WCAG Overview: Principles, Guidelines, and Success Criteria

WCAG is structured under four principles (POUR):

• Perceivable - Users can see or hear the content
• Operable - Users can navigate and use components
• Understandable - Content and UI behaves in predictable ways
• Robust - Content works across different technologies, including assistive tech

Each principle contains guidelines, and each guideline has one or more Success Criteria (SC). These SCs are testable and come with a conformance level:

• A (minimum),
• AA (industry standard),
• AAA (enhanced, not usually required)

What Are Normative vs. Non-Normative Documents?

• Normative = “you must do this.” These are required for conformance.

• Example: The WCAG success criteria themselves.

• Non-Normative = helpful guidance, not required.

• Example: Techniques, Understanding docs; they help explain how to meet SCs, but you don't have to follow them to meet conformance.

WCAG Supporting Documents (Sufficient, Failure, Advisory Techniques)

These are non-normative, but useful in showing that a certain approach will likely meet WCAG.

• Sufficient Techniques - Pass this and you're good!
• Failure Techniques - If your code does this, it fails.
• Advisory Techniques - Nice to have, not required.

WCAG Versioning

The WAS BoK states that candidates should know how WCAG has evolved:

• WCAG 2.0 (2008) - Original
• WCAG 2.1 (2018) - Added criteria for mobile, low vision, cognitive
• WCAG 2.2 (2023) - Focused more on cognitive needs, target size, authentication, etc.

The cool part of each version is that they are backward compatible. So a page that is WCAG 2.2-conformant also conforms to 2.1 and 2.0.

Resources I Found Helpful

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 official docs
• The Understanding WCAG 2.2 docs.
• The WCAG Techniques

What I Still Need to Understand better

• Understanding the changes in WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 (the BoK says candidates should demonstrate knowledge of this) - I've already listed out the changes in my WAS Study Google Sheet, so now it's just a matter of going over them repeatedly until they stick.

• Knowing all the Success Criteria, not just reading them, but remembering where they fall under each principle and what each one is about. I'm using flashcards for this and reviewing them randomly during the day to quiz myself.

  I wrote an article on Understanding WCAG