Web Accessibility (Wikipedia)
A general-encyclopedia overview of Web accessibility: assistive technologies, the WCAG/ATAG/UAAG guideline family, WAI-ARIA, country-by-country legislation, and auditing methods. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-06-24), not a fixed publication year — re-check the live page if a claim here needs revalidating against the current text.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- POUR principles: WCAG organizes its guidelines under four top-level principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
- WCAG 2.0’s structure: 4 principles → 12 untestable guidelines (goals) → 61 testable success criteria, each rated conformance level A, AA, or AAA.
- History: WCAG 1.0 (1999, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative) → WCAG 2.0 (December 2008) → adopted as ISO/IEC 40500:2012 → WCAG 2.1 (2018).
- Assistive technologies named: screen readers with synthesized speech, refreshable braille displays, screen magnification software, speech-recognition software, keyboard overlays, and closed captioning/sign-language access for video.
- Legal landscape is global, not just U.S.: beyond Section 508/ADA, the article documents accessibility laws or standards in the EU (European Accessibility Act, applicable since June 2025), UK (Equality Act 2010, BS 8878), Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, and many other countries — accessibility compliance is now a near-universal legal requirement, not a U.S.-specific one.
- A 2018 WebAIM survey found about 93% of respondents had received no formal training in Web accessibility — cited as context for why automated scanners alone (which catch only a fraction of real issues) remain so common despite their limits.