WCAG

The goal of web accessibility is to ensure that all people, including those with disabilities, are able to have access to websites and web content. The internet’s importance in our daily lives continues to grow, impacting everything from instructional technology to serious educational initiatives. This means that providing equal educational opportunities to all students requires a strong commitment to web accessibility.

As parents, children, and educators all continue to navigate distance learning, it is the perfect time to examine the reasons why making websites accessible is so important for education.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the most well-known and established set of web accessibility recommendations. WCAG 2.0 is a technical standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is an internationally known community that develops open standards for the internet.

Educational settings should adopt these web accessibility standards and begin to put these rules into practice.

WCAG is broadly broken down into four principles:

• Perceivable: Users must be able to perceive it in some way, using one or more of their senses.

• Operable: Users must be able to control UI elements (e.g. buttons must be clickable in some way — mouse, keyboard, voice command, etc.).

• Understandable: The content must be understandable to its users.

• Robust: The content must be developed using well-adopted web standards that will work across different browsers, now and in the future.