Day 2: WCAG Perceivable, Part 1

Published on 01 Dec 2018

• journal
• resources
• was
• perceivable
• wcag

Day 2... a weekend day, which can make it harder to make time to set aside for studying. I did it, though, spending roughly an hour and a half working through documentation, mulling over only part of the first WCAG principle, and working toward visualizing the different guidelines, success criterion, and techniques. I didn't get as far as I would've liked either, yet this is the deepest work I've ever done at combing through the WCAG docs.

• Read through the Perceivable principle in WCAG 2.1 documentation (normative and non-normative).
• Started a spreadsheet to visualize relationships between principles, guidelines, success criterion, and techniques. Specifically I mapped out the perceivable principle.
• Discovered techniques that failed to meet criterion within the perceivable principle.
• Dug into helpful solutions to common situations (satisfactory techniques) via W3C's "How to Meet WCAG 2.1". Seriously, this resource is extremely helpful for all those situations I've had to figure out how to be more inclusive, and the documentation is there to back up my decision when I have to present it to my team!

In the process of trying to memorize guidelines and success criterion, I reinforced the image of the layers that exist within WCAG:

• principles (POURing the foundation)
• guidelines (13 objectives authors should work toward)
• success criteria (testable criteria; includes conformance levels A, AA, AAA)
• sufficient and advisory techniques (examples of situations and solutions)

Additionally, looking closer at each criterion helped me to identify the additions made to WCAG 2.0's first principle:

• Orientation
• Identify input purposes
• Identify purpose
• Reflow
• Non-text contrast
• Text spacing
• Content on hover or focus

When reading through the description about text alternatives, I ran across a concept new to me: "simpler language" is considered a text alternative under Guideline 1.1. Also, there are some identified exceptions to the text alternative guideline. Those exceptions apply to:

• controls or input fields
• time-based media
• tests/exams
• specific sensory experiences
• CAPTCHA
• decorative images or typography