National and international standards
Web accessibility
The W3C is a non-profit organisation which develops protocols and guidelines for the Web. In 1996 the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was founded to establish accessibility guidelines for the different components of the web, including web content, web browsers and media players, authoring tools and evaluation tools.
The WAI has created several working groups that work on guidelines including:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) for dynamic web applications built in JavaScript
- Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) for content management systems (CMS)
- User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) for web browsers and screen readers
Using these W3C guidelines to test the accessibility of real websites can raise technical and methodological challenges. To overcome this, additional guidelines and standards have been developed in various countries. In France, BrailleNet developed the AccessiWeb framework for testing conformity to WCAG 2.0 success criteria which was adopted by the French government in 2015 as the basis of the revised national standard for digital accessibility in the public sector, the Référentiel Général d’Accessibilité pour les Administrations (RGAA).
International Guidelines
WCAG
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), created and maintained by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, provide technical [...]