Spotlight 1:

Overview of the WCAG Guidelines

For the first spotlight, we thought we'd start with an overview of the WCAG guidelines.

WCAG Basics

Created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (known as WCAG) are an internationally recognised set of recommendations for improving content accessibility on the World Wide Web (e.g. the internet).

Even though not all organisations are required to be WCAG compliant, following these guidelines helps create content that is accessible to a wide audience.

The WCAG guidelines are grouped into 4 categories known as the POUR principles. POUR stands for:

Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust

All the guidelines are grouped into one of these 4 categories and each guideline is further categorized according to its conformance level:

Level A is the most basic
Level AA is intermediate
Level AAA is desired

In the latest version of WCAG (WCAG 2.2), there are 86 standards altogether. While that may sound like a lot, some of these are related to each other, and also not all of these are applicable to learning content creation.

In the spotlights, we'll go over the relevant guidelines. In this spotlight, let's just get a brief overview of them in general.

Resources:

Watch a 15-minute overview of WCAG guidelines:

Link: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and 2.0 Explained

For a more visual overview, check out Intopia's map:

Link: WCAG 2.2 map by Intopia (Licence link, Original source)

Discussion questions:

If you're already familiar with the topic, or when you're finished, come to the LCA Spotlight LinkedIn group and join the conversation.

Which WCAG guideline are you the most comfortable with?
Which guideline do you find the most difficult to get right?
Which WCAG guidelines does your authoring tool not support?

When you post in the community, use the hashtag #LCASpotlightWCAG

All past spotlights

Spotlight 2: Assistive technology