What is Accessibility?

To say your site accessible means that the site's content is available and functional to by literally anyone. It is common to believe that users of your site have and can use they same tools that you do. But the truth is that there are many different types of people using many different types of ways of access your content. It can be difficult to know where to start. Fortunately, the W3C has provided us with the WCAG and the WAI-ARIA to guide and help use create more accessible websites.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

While WCAG provides a comprehensive overview of what it means for content to be accessible, it can also be a bit overwhelming. To help mitigate this, the WebAIM group has distilled the WCAG guidelines into an easy-to-follow checklist, targeted specifically for web content.

WebAIM Checklist

The WebAIM checklist can give you a short, high-level summary of what you need to implement, while also linking to the underlying WCAG specification if you need an expanded definition.

With this tool in hand, you can chart a direction for your accessibility work and be confident that, as long as your project meets the outlined criteria, your users should have a positive experience accessing your content.