The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community developing web standards. They publish comprehensive guidelines on 'Web Content Accessibility' (WCAG) which can be viewed in full here, with a breakdown available here.
There is a useful review tool here which can provide a checklist to meet WCAG standards to A, AA and AAA levels ā it is worth noting that UK guidelines only request AA compliance. The guidance is broken up into 4 key concepts: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable & Robustā a few examples of the guidelines relevant for us are:
- All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose...
- Content does not restrict its view and operation to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape, unless a specific display orientation is essential.
- All functionality of the content is operable through a keyboard interface...
- The default human language of each Web page can be programmatically determined.
While these guidelines might sound difficult or complex to implement, these requirements are often a core part of digital languages such as HTML, or frameworks such as React, with a whole host of tools available to check for WCAG compatibility.