{"id":591,"date":"2020-11-15T11:46:34","date_gmt":"2020-11-15T10:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/?p=591"},"modified":"2020-11-15T11:46:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T10:46:34","slug":"wcag-compliance-alone-does-not-guarantee-accessibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2020\/11\/wcag-compliance-alone-does-not-guarantee-accessibility\/","title":{"rendered":"WCAG compliance alone does not guarantee accessibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With better understanding about what accessibility really is we can also find some surprising theoretical revelations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is possible that our website is 100% WCAG compliant and still not accessible.<\/p>can really surprise us…<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But it is actually very logical – WCAG are only guidelines that should be applied to content and do not define the usability. Accessibility has a lot to do with usability as well. We can make our site WCAG compliant and still have a bad screen-reader usability for example. So screen-reader users can experience difficulties when using the site or site’s elements also if we made sure everything is compliant with WCAG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore it is crucial to also test with assistive technologies, especially screen-readers, on desktop and on mobile, with different combinations of screen-readers and browsers, to really verify the accessibility<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WCAG will for sure help, but it alone will not always be enough<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

WCAG success criteria is technology-agnostic, so it can be applied to any digital surface, but at the same time this is also limiting it’s effects on specific technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time we must not forget the differences of support from one assistive technology to another. This has nothing to do with WCAG but a lot to do with usability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example some ARIA tags are not (yet) supported on some screen-reader and browser combinations, therefore we could be passing the WCAG but also failing to really be accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manual testing is therefore even more important<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While automatic testing will help to some degree (it is estimated that it can be approximately 20%, some improvements are being done so this can also be a bit higher) and can add to quality in the development and release life-cycles – we ought to test manually as well, based on user journeys and maybe even personas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we can really improve our accessibility and be confident of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is possible that our website is 100% WCAG compliant and still not accessible to an assistive technology user. WCAG alone is not enough, we must test manually as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,3],"tags":[12,25,166,157,27,29],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility-testing","category-principles","tag-aria","tag-screen-reader","tag-screen-reader-2","tag-test","tag-testing","tag-wcag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}