Aboot (that’s Canadian for “about”) this site

This wcag2.com site is brought to you by David Berman Communications, helping improve the world through effective, inclusive design since 1984.

David Berman Communications strongly believes that we can design a better world that leaves no one behind. We’ve been leaders in the online accessibility field for over 15 years, and we’re eager to help you gain from the benefits of inclusive design. We strategize, we train, we coach, we analyse, we publish, we design, we remediate, we test and certify WCAG, PDF/UA, AODA, ADA, and Section 508 compliance … filling the gaps in your expertise and capacity, so that you can broaden your reach, drive down costs, improve SEO, with techniques that improve the experience for your entire audience. What ever you are doing, whether you’re publishing Web, apps, PDF, Office, InDesign, or eLearning, we’re eager to help.

What we can do for you

Web and document accessibility for disabilities is our most practical example of how doing good is also good business, and so we’ve made it a specialty. That’s why governments in 6 countries, private sector companies, and NGOs use our strategies on what to do and how to do it.

Analyse: We review your online presence and products for gap and risk analysis, as to what degree your sites and documents comply with federal, provincial and state regulations. We can help you develop the document development and remediation strategy best for your jurisdiction, documents, and audiences, increasing compliance while reducing costs.

Train + Motivate: We motivate and train your team as to why Web accessibility matters, and how to get it done, demystifying regulations into satisfying easy-to-follow steps. We provide public and onsite courses and manuals, as well as one-on-one coaching using your documents.

Remediate: We can fix your documents or programming code if you don’t have the time or resources … or coach your team if you do. We can remediate your HTML, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, InDesign, LiveCycle Designer / AEM Forms Designer, Google Docs, or PDF files, to comply with WCAG, AODA, or PDF/UA standards. Our service includes remediation and verification.

Test + Certify: Finally, we execute technical and user testing (including coaching you on remaining gaps then retesting), and provide a WCAG-EM compliant formal report and expert opinion letter (our certifications have a 100% track record in courts of law), and certificate of your degree of compliance so you can demonstrate your compliance to others… for regulators, for clients, for users, and for society.

Read our white paper on why accessibility matters if you’d like to get a better sense of our philosophy regarding inclusive design.

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Our Experience

e-Accessibility

We are experts in conforming to every global accessibility standard, including WCAG and PDF/UA requirements for accessible Web and documents. We have performed accessibility audits and reviews on both government and private sector websites in over 40 countries for Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation.

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508

It is our specialty to accommodate all aspects of ADA and the Revised Section 508 legislation, as it applies (both in regulation and in case law) to government, business, and other institutions. This covers accessible documents, Web publishing, and distance learning. As such, we have provided counsel and coaching to U.S. government, financial institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and leading colleges regarding meeting and exceeding requirements, while mitigating legal risk.

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA)

It is our standard procedure to comply with all relevant requirements of the accessibility standards called for in the regulations under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA). We’re very proud of our role in helping advise the government on how to keep AODA an example that has been emulated in many other countries.

We are experts in the fulfillment of AODA regulations regarding accessible documents and Web publishing, as well as non-IT areas. Our strength in this area is such that we run regular courses in Ontario that specifically teach executives, managers, educators, designers, and developers how to comply with AODA regulations. The Accessibility Directorate of Ontario itself (who governs AODA) has retained us repeatedly for speaking at their events and for training of their managers and staff.

PDF standards

David Berman is a member of the ISO committee that has developed the international standard for accessible PDF (PDF/UA). We have provided training on strategizing, developing and testing accessible PDF files, including Adobe employees, and at Adobe headquarters. We run regular public courses that team Web teams how to create accessible documents, whether starting from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Illustrator, InDesign, or LiveCycle Designer / AEM Forms Designer.

About David Berman CPWA CPACC WAS ADS

David Berman was amongst the first people worldwide to hold all of the CPWA, WAS, CPACC, and ADS digital accessibility certifications (in fact, he was the first person in Canada to sit for the examinations), the World’s highest certification for accessibility professionals, issued by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. IAAP is a division of G3ICT, for which David is an International Advisor and IAAP Global Chair.
In 2025, David’s team at David Berman Communications (incorporated 1990) was rated #1 nationally by the federal government’s procurement agency regarding accessibility conformance testing for websites, documents (PDF and non-PDF), mobile apps, and non-Web software.
In 2023, David was elected Chair of the Global Council of the IAAP, after serving since 2018 as an appointment member of the GLC and a member of IAAP since its first year.
Since 2021, David currently serves on accessible standards developments committees for Accessible Standards Canada (ASC), including the accessible plain language committee and the web standard committee that led to adoption and development of a Canadian version of EN 301 549.
In 2019, David and his team were hired by both the Government of Canada and by a coalition of Canada’s top accessibility organizations to advise on the content of the Accessible Canada Act, as well as to provide advice on policies that will inform the regulations to come.
In 2017, David was appointed by the Government of Ontario’s Minister for accessibility to serve on the AODA standards development committee for digital accessibility for Ontario’s world-leading AODA accessibility regulations.
In 2015, he was named an Invited Expert to W3C, the authors of WCAG.
In 2015, he was appointed International Universal Design Champion for the Government of Ireland.
Since 2012, David has served as a member of the ISO committee for accessible PDF (PDF/UA) as well as the ISO committee for the ISO Plain Language standard
In 2012, David was appointed Chair of Carleton University’s Carleton Access Network for accessible information technology, run out of Carleton University’s Paul Menton Centre for Students with Disabilities as an initiative of the School of Engineering, and has provided accessibility training and consulting to schools across Ontario.
In 2009, David was appointed a high-level advisor to the United Nations on how accessible Web design can help fulfill the Millennium Development Goals.
In 1999, David was elected Vice-President of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and served as national Ethics Chair for over a decade, earning Fellow status … then helped created (and served as the first elected president of) the RGD (the Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario, the World’s first legislated professional certification in graphic design
Awarded Ico-D / Icograda Lifetime Member status, after serving for over 8 years on their Executive Board, including roles of Vice-President, Sustainability Chair, and Treasurer
David has keynoted on inclusive design at the largest design conferences in each of 5 continents, as part of a speaking tour that has brought him to over 60 countries
David has served as a judge for over a dozen design competitions worldwide, from AD&D in London, UK to the Bubu Awards in Jakarta, Indonesia.
David remains a member of many design and accessibility organizations, from Blissymbolics to the Canadian Association of the Deaf, awarded a Lifetime Member of the Norwegian Graphic Association, Honorary Member of Indonesian Graphic Designers, Honorary Member of Graphic Designers Association of Malaysia, Honorary Board Member of AIGA Cincinnati, and Unicode Consortium
He was contracted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation to audit online accessibility in over 40 countries for the annual theWebIndex.org benchmark report.
His book Do Good Design (Peachpit/Pearson 2009/2013/2018) has been published in 8 languages.
Overall, David has over 30 years of experience in design, branding, and communications, including accessible Web and UX development.
He regularly teaches WCAG accessibility as part of his professional development workshops. His work includes award-winning projects for the City of Ottawa, the Ontario government, and Canada’s federal government.
David has provided consultancy, training, and testing to IBM, the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services’ AODA office, and the Norwegian Design Council on accessibility issues, and has worked on over 30 federal websites where such an appreciation is mandatory. He has provided design and consulting work for the International Space Station, Justice Canada, Health Canada, The World Bank, the Sierra Club, Statistics Canada, Canada Revenue Agency, Treasury Board Secretariat, and the Ontario Literacy Coalition, Tiger Conservation via WWF Canada, as well as extensive work involving applying accessibility guidelines to large government web presences.
Amongst the most challenging and proudest projects, he worked on the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights design of the language plaques in two dozen Indigenous languages, many of which no font yet existed (digitized special fonts optimized for the unique character sets as well as for production in carved stone).
His clients include Google, Manulife, Air Canada, World Health Organizations, Canadian Marketing Association, BMO, IBM, Honda, the International Space Station, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the World Bank, Sierra Club, APA, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Educational Inc., Via Rail, Limina, Loblaw Companies Limited, Ipsos, City of Vancouver, FEMA, Statistics Canada, University of Toronto, LCBO, Internet Society, Kenyon College, Deloitte, Shoppers Drug Mart, Ernst & Young LLP, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Canadian Museum of Nature, OC Transpo, Iowa State University, City of Ottawa, Museum of Nature, Norwegian Design Council, The Conference Board of Canada, National Research Council, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, Corus Entertainment, International Plain Language Association, Information Technology Authority Sultanate Of Oman, Ireland’s National Disability Authority, Center for Plain Language, and the Aga Khan Foundation.

More on David: Full biography and CV: http://www.davidberman.com/about/biography

Frequently asked questions

Q. “How many WCAG 2.0 Level A success criteria are there?”

WCAG 2.0 has 25 Level A success criteria.

Transcript | How many WCAG 2.0 success criteria are there?

Transcript of “How many WCAG 2.0 success criteria are there?”

This is a transcript of the video How many WCAG 2.0 success criteria are there?.

(David Berman appears on screen in front of a shared screen showing PowerPoint slides and faces the camera for the duration of this video. David is wearing a black jacket with a blue shirt and tie.)

Now, the technical standard, though, that we all hear so much about is called WCAG or “W-C-A-G” which stands for the “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”. The cool kids call it “Wih-cag”, partially because that’s what the… that’s what the screen readers call it. JAWS would call it “Wih-cag”, so we all called it “Wih-cag”! So it’s totally okay to say “W-C-A-G” as well, but saying “double-you-cag”: that just doesn’t sound right. So if you want to seem credible, talk about “Wih-cag” or “W-C-A-G”. Now “W-C-A-G” is a technical standard developed by the W3C. That’s the Worldwide Web Consortium. And the W3C, which is a, an NGO, is responsible for most of the standards that that we use to communicate on the web. Everything from HTML to PHP, and I could go on and on with all kinds of three-letter acronyms, are brought to us by the W3C. So, one of many things the W3C does is they have a group called WAI, which is the Web Accessibility Initiative. And that’s the that’s the part that I get to work with, and they publish WCAG. And WCAG, there was a WCAG one, and then there was a WCAG 2. And we’ll be talking about 2.0 and 2.1, and that very new shiny 2.2 WCAG which just was uh finalized last month in October 2023. But all the WCAGs have something in common. They’re made up of conformance requirements and those conformance requirements are fulfilled by something called the success criteria, which is kind of a rule. So I’m going to unpack this for you, for you now.

So, WCAG 2 which is version 2.0 has three levels. Level A, AA and AAA or we often call them A and double A. And the idea is that the success criteria you could say if I want an entire product to be considered WCAG 2 AA conformant that is if I want my website to be able to say the whole website is WCAG 2 AA conformant then I have to fulfill all the level A success criteria and in WCAG 2.0 there are 25 of them and then also all the double A criteria. So in WCAG 2.0 there’s 13 more. So that would be 25 at level A plus 13 more at AA. Which means I have to fulfill 38 success criteria. If I fail at any of them, I cannot say the entire product is WCAG 2.0 conformant to level AA. Now there’s also AAA success criteria in WCAG. And it’s understandable that people when they first get into this, they say, “Oh man, we’re going to we’re going to just do an amazing job here. We’re going to slay that. We’re going to do all the AAA things as well.” But the challenge is that’s actually not a great idea. So when I said we can develop any product and get it to conform to WCAG 2 AA without tradeoffs, that’s because we’re stopping at AA. At AAA, AAA actually starts bringing in intentional tradeoffs, advanced maneuvers intended for audience with specific limitations. And that’s why you won’t find a regulation on the entire planet which calls for WCAG at AAA level. So what we typically prescribe to our clients or governments we’re working with is: let’s tell people they need to conform to level AA and we’re going to do it in a way with no tradeoffs, and then we’ll pick and choose from the AAA things where it fits our audience. Maybe we’d say, hm, which of these AAA success criteria would be especially valuable to help us work with a conspicuously elderly population? And that’s great. But we’re going to focus today then almost always on the A’s and the AA’s because all the legislation we know of on Earth pretty well calls for AA.

Q. “How many WCAG 2.0 Level AA success criteria are there?”

WCAG 2.0 has 13 Level AA success criteria.

Q. “How many WCAG 2.0 Level AAA success criteria are there?”

WCAG 2.0 has 23 Level AAA success criteria.

Q. “How many WCAG 2.1 success criteria are there?”

WCAG 2.1 has 12 additional Level A (5 more) and Level AA (7 more) success criteria, and 5 more at Level AAA.

Q. “How many WCAG 2.2 success criteria are there?”

WCAG 2.2 has 6 additional Level A and Level AA success criteria, as well as additional Level AAA success criteria.

Q. “What is first change the laws or change the practice? It looks like is very difficult to introduce changes in literacy without affecting rights and laws.”

It is true that regulations exist that force us to use unclear language. However there are far more cases where we have the freedom to model clearer communication. By doing the latter whenever feasible, I’m confident we’ll widen our sphere of influence… which itself will speed improvements to regulations.

Q. “How is being drunk a disability?”

Being drunk is not a disability. Being drunk is an impairment. Whether permanent or temporary, disabilities, impairments, and handicaps can all be mitigated by universal design.

Q. “How do you uncover bias in design?”

There are many ways. My favourite would be starting with a clear strategic charter for each project that both defines precisely the demographics of the audience and also plans for early usability testing as part of the work plan.

Q. “Can you talk a little more about how cognitive burden or load impacts accessibility and usability?”

We all enjoy being in flow. And because we rarely have the opportunity to customize our communications for each individual audience member, we have the challenge of making our communications both intriguing and clear… so we don’t lose anyone.

Essentially, the rules of cognitive load differ for the same message, if it is being heard versus if it is being seen. If I am reading a sentence, I know that I can move at a high speed, confident that if I get puzzled, I can go back and re-read. However, if I am hearing a sentence in realtime, I have to be more attentive if I won’t be able to rewind… as well, I am more apt to try to anticipate what comes next: which means that primacy of word order helps the likelihood that I will successfully anticipate what comes next .

Images help give context to a sighted user, but alternative text of such images that are heard by someone who cannot see and that add no useful content are arguably just in the way of the message, with the duplication being more burdensome than helpful.

I have much more to say about this – give me a call and we can discuss it further 🙂

Q. “Could you please mention to typeface that works better for dyslexics?”

There are several typefaces that have been developed specifically with a dyslexic audience in mind. Some are quite overt, while others are subtle enough for mainstream use. The typeface I show in my slides is called Read Regular.

Q. “What are some important questions I can ask myself or my team to better consider the needs of others.”

Perhaps the most important question to ask ourselves is this: “Is there a reason we don’t want to communicate with everyone? If not, then why aren’t we?”

Q. “Can you discuss why it is important to create accessible downloadable documents from websites?”

Accessible documents are just as important as accessible webpages (especially if the content is not replicated elsewhere in an accessible format) …for every reason a typical user would need or enjoy having offline content available.

Q. “What is WCAG 2.0?”

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which I’m proudly a part of. W3C is the main international standards organization for the Internet.

WCAG 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities.

Got anymore questions? Visit www.davidberman.com/about/contactus/