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WCAG Compliance
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are the internationally accepted standard for web accessibility (though WCAG 1.0 is still an acceptable standard for some existing sites). They are written by the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C provide detailed resources on these guidelines which can be found at WCAG Resources. The following is taken from W3C
The "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" are a W3C specification providing guidance on accessibility of Web sites for people with disabilities. They have been developed by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. The specification contains fourteen guidelines which are general principles of accessible design. Each guideline is associated with one or more checkpoints describing how to apply that guideline to particular features of Web pages. These guidelines not only make pages more accessible to people with disabilities, but also have the side benefit of making pages more accessible to all users, or to users using different browsers or one of the emerging handheld or voice-based computers.
Automated WCAG validation
There are many free automated WCAG validation services on the web. WAVE from Webaim is one of the better tools ( http://wave.webaim.org ) and a quick Google search will find many others. Automated tests like this are useful at quickly assessing some of the WCAG Guidelines but they are not a guarantee of accessibility. Many of the guidelines cannot be checked automatically and, while useful, automated testers only do part of the job.
There are, regrettably, several companies that pass these reports off as full access audits. Often they charge clients considerable sums for simply transposing the automated report into an access audit.
Human WCAG evaluation
Automated validation services leave many "interpretation" gaps. They check the code for obvious error but can only indicate where they may be a problem. These have to be checked by hand.
If you need a complete accessibility assessment, or want to know how best to build upon your current accessibility testing processes (or indeed whether these are working as they should) we can help. Our reports can also include usability studies, end user testing and accessible templates and code for your technical / design teams to work from. Talk to us about what you need and we can tailor the audit to your requirements.
