Front-End Accessibility: Introduction to WCAG 2

2 min readJan 24, 2024

In today’s episode, I give a brief introduction to WCAG 2, the 4 principles of accessibility, and a few learning materials by W3C WAI for understanding and implementing WCAG 2.

Enjoy!

What is WCAG?

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a set of guidelines developed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), to address the need for web content to be accessible to people with disabilities. The latest version, WCAG 2.2, was published on 5 October 2023.

Web content generally refers to information you may find on a web site, including Text, Video, Audio, Images and Forms.

4 Principles of Accessibility

These are known as the “P.O.U.R” principles:

Perceivable — Content must be presented in a way users can perceive. It can’t be invisible to all their senses.
Operable — Supports various modes of interactions, not requiring an interaction a user can’t perform.
Understandable — Information and operation of the interface can be understood by all users.
Robust — Content can be interpreted reliably by various user agents and assistive technologies.

Guidelines

Each of the 4 principles categorises a list of guidelines, and there are 13 guidelines in total. A few of them are:

1.1 — Text Alternatives,
2.3 — Seizures and Physical Reactions,
2.4 — Navigable,
3.3 — Input Assistance, etc.

We will delve into each of these guidelines in subsequent posts.

Supporting documents

Aside the stable technical standard, WCAG introduces these informative supporting documents to help web authors understand and implement WCAG:

Up next…

In the following post, we will look at the first principle of accessibility, “Perceivable”, what it means, and why it matters to the accessibility of web content.

Stay tuned for more!

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This article was written as an accessible alternative to the post shared on my LinkedIn account.