Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

9.5. Accessibility Standards

Many organizations such as federal governments and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) have published standards to describe accessibility elements that web applications should adhere to, to be considered accessible by all users.

For the most part, standards are a good thing; they help to raise awareness that not all web applications are accessible to all users right out-of-the-box.

The trouble with standards is that developers focus a great deal of time to understand each set of rules, and often developers learn what they interpret to be the rules without learning how to incorporate the rules into accessible web applications.

I have met many creative developers that feel that abiding to standards will make their appellations bland and dull, looking much like unformatted text documents. As you have hopefully learned by now, this is far from the truth.

The standards that are in place are hard to read and in many situations developers interpret some of the rules incorrectly. The next section is intended to help clarify some of the more difficult rules to understand. Each standard has a link to the complete set of standards if you are looking for the definitive guide.

Knowing the rules is only useful if you know what they actually mean.

9.5.1. WCAG 1.0

In May 1999, the WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium) published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) with the goal of explaining how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities. ...