What's New in Accessibility? WCAG 2.1 in a nutshell

Erin Marchak and David MacDonald

Slow down... wasn't it just yesterday that we were learning about the proper use of headings, to add alternative text to images, and that divs have no meaning?

Actually, it was nearly a decade ago that the W3C released WCAG 2.0, and the guidelines have been adopted by organizations and governments around the world as the defacto standard on web content accessibility.

"Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these." (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/). Knowing and adopting these standards should be the norm for those of us working on the web.

But, as we all know, the web is constantly evolving. When WCAG 2.0 was released iPhones were for early adopters, Facebook was just passing 100 million users, and ride sharing with Uber didn't exist.

Which is why in 2016 the W3C decided to start work on WCAG 2.1, to "...build on WCAG 2.0 to provide guidance urgently needed for today’s technologies" (https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/10/wcag-2-1-under-exploration/).

WCAG 2.1 is still under development, but the recommended success criteria can be used now to improve the accessibility of the web for all- something we should all be keen to do.

What you will learn:
What is WCAG 2.0, and how are the guidelines structured
What new success criteria have been recommended for WCAG 2.1, and how do the improve accessibility
How you can provide feedback to the development of WCAG 2.1

https://drupalnorth.org/en/session/whats-new-accessibility-wcag-21-nutshell

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