WCAG after quarter of a century – we still need more awareness

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Quarter of a century later and we still don’t have enough awareness, support, knowledge, buy-in for accessibility. It is improving, but slowly, we need even more advocates.

WCAG 1.0 was published as a recommendation on May the 5th, 1999. And here we are, 25 years later, with WCAG 2.2 as the latest version. Unfortunately many professionals still deliver digital products withouth even knowing about accessibility.

If I think about current state of inaccessibility of the web, I can not help to wonder why we are still struggling with the basics, with awareness and with inaccessibility being the default. How come WCAG still isn’t integrated into every step of digital production? Not to mention education (both official and non-official)? Sure, there is a lot of progress made and eventually schools will teach some parts of accessibility, some bootcamps will integrate basic WCAG and people will be more aware, but after 25 years we are in most cases still at the beginning.

Current legislative changes seem to improve the awareness part, but it would be way easier if WCAG would be embraced as an essential part of the digital production, as one of key elements – that it would be there as a default, just like security is. Legislation forces WCAG to be seen as a compliance risk, and a checkbox needed to be checked – all of it is not optimal and sometimes it triggers some sort of rebellion. The bad sort of rebellion – where people work against changes to the better, not understanding the implications. Where WCAG is representing cost but not benefits.

As accessibility advocates we need to be better at promoting the good parts of the accessibility and only reach out to legislation when people really can’t be convinced. But it is difficult, as WCAG are only guidelines and people sometimes expect they have all the answers or even recipes. When we consider the complexity and the advancements of digital technologies we can fast understand that WCAG will always be behind, there will always be situations where it will be difficult to suggest best solutions, but we really can and must promote the basics and make things more accessible with it.

We definitely need more awareness, still, after all those years. Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is a nice initiative, although I don’t like it only a single day (people do work around that more and more, as it is sometimes causing “attention cannibalism” with hundreds of events on the same day).

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me:

2 thoughts on “WCAG after quarter of a century – we still need more awareness”

  1. It’s not very optimistic, but I believe the answer to the question of why is that we just built ever more sites ever faster, with bad quality. That’s all.

    To build more stuff faster, we add developers who learned quickly, and don’t master the basics.

    I still find myself explaining to clients, colleagues, and even worse superiors the basics of responsive web design or accessibility. The same principles for 15 years now.

    Quality (including respect of the WCAG) was left behind in favour of quantity. Sad.

    1. Thank you for your comment, Andy.

      Totally agree, seems that latest and gratest is more attractive than robust and accessible.

      Happy to see that new legislation seems to help a bit. At least introducing the need for accessibility to circles that denied it before. And also having impacts on the education.

      Will take time, but progress is already visible. We still need more awareness though.

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