INDUSTRY STANDARDS
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
The (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's primary activity is to developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. W3C's standards define key parts of what makes the World Wide Web work.
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guideline)
WCAG defines the requirements for making Web content accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, and others. Adhering to WCAG will make your Web content more usable to many other users, including older users. It will also enable people to access Web content using many different devices - including a wide variety of assistive technologies and mobile technologies.
WCAG 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. The guidelines do not include standard usability recommendations except where they have specific impact on accessibility.
WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
WAI-ARIA is a technical specification that provides a framework to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications.
Aspects of traditional HTML make accessible support of dynamic content difficult:
Accessibility relies on abstracting semantics from both content and presentational information. Extracting semantic cues from current HTML content is typically unreliable as the cues are limited to tag elements names.
HTML allows content to be repurposed for presentational formatting without providing a way to convey semantic information. A common example of this content formatted with tables rather than style sheets.
When combined with script and CSS, HTML can be repurposed to create dynamic custom components without providing a means to convey semantic information to native accessibility architectures designed to support dynamic GUI content.
HTML lacks the ability to attach meaningful metadata about document structure.
HTML elements commonly used for repurposing produce custom components that are not keyboard accessible.
Authors of JavaScript-generated content do not want to limit themselves to using standard tag elements that define the actual user interface element such as tables, ordered lists, etc. Rather, they make extensive use of elements such as DIV tags in which they dynamically apply a UI through the use of style sheets and dynamic content changes. HTML DIV tags provide no semantic information. For example, authors may define a DIV as the start of a pop-up menu or even an ordered list. However, no HTML mechanism exists to:
• Identify the role of the DIV as a pop-up menu
• Alert assistive technology when these elements have focus
• Convey accessibility property information, such as whether the pop-up menu is collapsed or expanded
• Define what actions can be formed on the element other than through a device-dependent means through the event handler type (onMouseover, onClick, etc.)
• In short, JavaScript needs accessibility architecture to write to such that a solution can be mapped to the accessibility frameworks on the native platform by the user agent.
