From the course: WordPress: Accessibility

Web accessibility concepts - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Accessibility

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Web accessibility concepts

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- [Instructor] Let's start by breaking down the concept of web accessibility in four principles. Perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness. These four principles are the foundation of what makes digital content accessible. Write down some notes on these four principles, so you can easily answer the assessment questions that test your knowledge between videos. These concepts were established by the Worldwide Web Consortium or W3C in a document called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG. They describe a set of detailed criteria you can use to test your website content for accessibility. Perceivability is about a user's ability to get information from web content. Perceivable content is content that can be absorbed equally using more than one sense. Images can be described with text, videos are provided with audio descriptions and captions. Because plain text can be interpreted using text to audio software, written text is the foundation element of accessible information. Operability is about interacting with content. A website is operable if every item on the page can be used no matter what device is in use. Any HTML link, button, or input field can be used with a mouse, with a keyboard, using a touchscreen such as a mobile phone or tablet, or with the more limited inputs in a switch system. Understandability is about comprehension. A user may be able to perceive the literal text on your website, but not be able to understand it. A user may fail to understand your content for many reasons. Failure to define the language of the content or provide the definitions of unusual words or abbreviations are a significant problem. Consistency and predictability in navigation, and clarity of labels for input fields, or handling of errors are also important. Robustness is all about future proofing. A website is robust if it works reliably in current and future browsers and with assistive technologies. This mostly requires that the code conforms to defined standards. When writing according to standards, any device that is aware of that standard can display the content. All of these principles work together to help you create documents that give users a fair chance at successfully using your website.

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