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.