World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines and standards

Introduction

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops various guidelines and other standards related to web accessibility. They are essential and useful references for developers of e-learning tools and materials. The interrelationships of the different W3C guidelines and standards would promote specific components of and overall web accessibility.
This section provides some examples of the W3C guidelines and standards. Refer to the list of all W3C accessibility-related Standards and Working Group Notes for further details.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is an international standard that documents how to make web content and its associated electronic information and communication, and multimedia materials more accessible to people with disabilities.
The basic accessibility principle is to make the content perceivable, operable, robust, and understandable (“POUR”) by everyone regardless of disabilities.

This mobile accessibility guidance summarizes essential standards and strategies that make web contents more accessible to people with disabilities when they are using mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and wearables like smart watches.
It touches on a wide range of accessibility issues such as touchscreens and differences in screen sizes.

The overview of cognitive accessibility of web content could serve to raise awareness and promote basic understanding.
The Cognitive Accessibility Guidance provides examples of design rationale, patterns, and practical tips on how to make web contents more accessible to people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) documents how to make the authoring tools themselves accessible, so that people with disabilities can use the tools to create web content; and how users of the authoring tools create accessible web content.
According to W3C, examples of authoring tools include:
- web page authoring tools, for example, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) HTML editors;
- software for generating websites, for example, content management systems (CMS) and learning management systems (LMS), courseware tools, content aggregators;
- software that converts to web content technologies, for example, word processors and other office document applications with Save as HTML or EPUB;
- multimedia authoring tools; and
- websites that let users add content, such as blogs, wikis, photo sharing sites, online forums, and social networking sites.
The guidance on selecting and using authoring tools for web accessibility provides checklists for authoring tool selection; and examples of strategies to work around limitations of existing authoring tools.

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) documents explain how to make user agents accessible to people with disabilities.
Examples of user agents include browsers, browser extensions, media players, readers and other applications that render web content.

The overview of evaluating web accessibility provides rich database of resources to help evaluate web accessibility.
For example, the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List includes the information about more than 100 software programs or online services that are useful for assessing the accessibility of web content.