I’ve intentionally wanted to use the verb POUR in my first blog post title and use it as an metaphor and now please allow me to explain why;
The four main guiding principles of accessibility (in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)) are:
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
So this is what POUR stands for – P(erceivable), O(perable), U(nderstandable), R(obust). Worth memorizing it as it is probably the shortest possible description of accessibility.
These letters are the four corner stones and the foundation for the (web) accessibility – and they do a good job explaining what accessibility really is about and what we must make sure of – if we want our products to be accessible.
To me personally it seems very logical – I like to lean myself on the basics of communication theory:
we have a message that we want to distribute through a channel and there are quite a lot of possible interruptions on the way (channel) from the sender of the message to the receiver of the message. At the same time the interruptions or problems may also occur on the sender or receiver sides.
So – to get the message through – all three key points must ensure that message will not be transformed or even lost. Message should therefore be perceivable (the receiver must be able to get it), operable (the receiver must be able to detect it is really a message), understandable (the receiver must get the point of the message) and robust (the message should not be transformed, malformed or even lost on it’s way).
- Sender is us – or our customer that we are building a website or web application for,
- Channel is the website or web application (and of course the web / internet itself),
- Receiver is the audience – the end-user (and the web crawler and the robot if we are totally honest about it 🙂 ).
Therefore we can come to the following conclusion:
To make messages Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust (POUR) – we need to respect basic rules that makes sure we can distribute the message to the majority of the receivers.
or applied to web;
To make our content POUR we have to respect and implement Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – that is the only reliable method to get our message out to the widest possible audience.
This post is meant as a introductory post for the POUR principles. Please revisit my blog and get more info on the POUR – I will go through all four letters and dissect them all.
