THE WEB STANDARDS AND W3C

Guy Woodland

W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

MindfulVisions mission is to train assistive technology users to audit website. Real people not algorithms and automated testing as we believe these can in par be misleading and confusing.

MindfulVisions believe that if you want to find out how accessible a website is then the user, the person navigating the website is the ultimate arbiter.

This is what W3C state on their own website.

Open Standards Principles

On 29 August 2012 five leading global organisations jointly signed an agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of Principles in support of The Modern Paradigm for Standards; an open and collectively empowering model that will help radically improve the way people around the world develop new technologies and innovate for humanity. Learn more about OpenStand: the modern paradigm for standards.

Design Principles

The following design principles guide W3C's work.

Web for All

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.

The number of different kinds of devices that can access the Web has grown immensely. Mobile phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, interactive television systems, voice response systems, kiosks and even certain domestic appliances can all access the Web.

Vision

W3C's vision for the Web involves participation, sharing knowledge, and thereby building trust on a global scale.

Web for Rich Interaction

The Web was invented as a communications tool intended to allow anyone, anywhere to share information. For many years, the Web was a "read-only" tool for many. Blogs and wikis brought more authors to the Web, and social networking emerged from the flourishing market for content and personalised Web experiences. W3C standards have supported this evolution thanks to strong architecture and design principles.

Some people view the Web as a giant repository of linked data while others as a giant set of services that exchange messages. The two views are complementary, and which to use often depends on the application.

The Web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now "meet on the Web" and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognises that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence. As more activity moves on-line, it will become even more important to support complex interactions among parties around the globe.

There are three levels of compliance – A, AA and AAA as stipulated by W3C.

Level A

Everything needs to be either HTML text, or have a descriptive Alt tag (which is text associated with the image). This will make a difference for buttons – they can’t be graphics anymore.
Colour cannot be the only way function is determined. For examples, links should be underlined on hover as well as a separate colour).
Visual or sound cues should not be necessary to continue.
Form fields need to be clearly labelled. Captchas have to be visually-impaired friendly.
For any audio or video, alternative content (like a text summary) is provided. Videos need to be closed-captioned.
Tables are not used for site layout, and any tables in the content are understandable from top to bottom, left to right (see below for examples).
The site is understandable if narrated from top to bottom, left to right. Content in template columns is OK, for example if your page has a main column plus a separate column for the side navigation.
Any audio or automatically updating or scrolling content (like banner sliders) can be paused or (where applicable) muted.
A visually impaired person needs to be able to press the Tab key on their keyboard in order to get through a page.
A “skip to content” link needs to be added at the start of the header so that people can bypass the main site navigation if they want.
Don’t randomly change the page in ways that could confuse the user. If clicking on a link results in a change like a popup window, you need to inform the user ahead of time.
Forms need to help users avoid and correct mistakes. This will mean descriptive label and validation that guides the user to the issue and make it really clear what the problem is.

Level AA

All requirements for A plus:

Colour contrast ratio between text and anything else is 4.5 to 1 or better.
There is a way to increase the text size, and the page doesn’t break when this happens (although it generally does not look great).
No information the user needs is embedded in text – in other words all images are strictly decorative.
There are multiple ways to find content, like site searches, site maps, and breadcrumbs. You can’t just have the main and side navigation.
All legal or financial data submitted by the user can be changed or deleted.

Level AAA

All requirements for A and AA plus:

All videos have sign language content.
Text has a contrast ratio of 7:1.
There are restrictions on how text content (80 characters or more) can be presented – for example it cannot be fully justified, line spacing has to conform to requirements, etc.
No content is timing-dependant.
Nothing flashes more than 3 times.
Content on the page is organised with headings and subheadings (a good practice anyway).
Any text that is not understandable by someone with 9 years of primary education has an understandable alternative or definition adjacent to it.
The user can prevent any content changes like pop up, and if enabled, they can control them.

The strength in these guidelines we feel should be more to do with building robust, well planned and well defined websites at the beginning rather than the guidelines being applied retrospectively.

One of Senclude overriding remits is education. A lot of websites fail because sometimes people do not think or consider other users. We like to explain why it is important and as such we talk with devlopers so when code is being created they too understand.

Forest Pathways