2. Introduction to WCAG
The Evolution of Web Accessibility
If you are interested in knowing about the history behind WCAG, take a look at the timeline of milestones described below.
1995: Web Accessibility Begins
It was during the mid-1990s that web accessibility awareness began to take hold, first mentioned by Tim Berners-Lee in his keynote speech at the 1994 Second International World Wide Web conference in Chicago. The Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines were compiled shortly after that at the TRACE Centre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. Version 8 of the Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines became the seed document for WCAG 1.0.
1999: WCAG 1.0 Released
It was not until 1999 that the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) was released by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This was a significant advancement in the promotion of an accessible web. With WCAG 1.0 it was possible to assess accessibility based on a standard, without the need to use applications like JAWS. That standard was also used by assistive technology (AT) developers (of screen readers, for instance) to better understand how AT should interact with content on the Web. One could then judge accessibility based on what the WCAG specification suggested should be done. But, there were problems with WCAG 1.0 that slowed its adoption. These problems would be addressed with the release of WCAG 2.0.
2008: WCAG 2.0 Released
In 2008 WCAG 2.0 was released to address the shortcomings of its predecessor. One of the significant changes included technology independence. This meant that what might previously have been associated with a barrier in HTML content was now a barrier regardless of the technology used.
For example, “include alt text with images,” "alt"
being an HTML attribute, became “include text alternatives for visual content,” with no reference to the technology presenting the content. WCAG 2.0 addressed accessibility across a whole range of web technologies, including things like Flash, Java, JavaScript, and other such technologies.
A second major change was the acceptance of JavaScript in WCAG 2.0 as a legitimate web technology. With WCAG 1.0, developers had to create alternatives to JavaScript elements they may have added to create interactivity in their web content. In other words, a website needed to operate with the same functionality if JavaScript was turned off in a user’s browser. This severely limited what developers could do while complying with WCAG 1.0 and became another contributing factor to the slow uptake of WCAG 1.0.
With the release of WCAG 2.0 this restriction was lifted. It is no longer a requirement to create alternatives to scripted features, though it is still a requirement to make those features accessible – certainly doable for most JavaScript interactivity we see in today’s websites.
2015: HTML5 & WAI ARIA
Today we have a number of new additions to the collection of accessibility standards