The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. They are a set of recommendations for making Web content more accessible, primarily for people with disabilities-but also for all user agents, including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones. The first web accessibility guideline was compiled by Gregg Vanderheiden and released in January 1995, just after the 1994 Second International Conference on the World-Wide Web (WWW II) in Chicago (where Tim Berners-Lee first mentioned disability access in a keynote speech after seeing a pre-conference workshop on accessibility led by Mike Paciello). Over 38 different Web access guidelines followed from various authors and organizations over the next few years. These were brought together in the Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines compiled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The first concept proposal of WCAG 2.0 was published on 25 January 2001. In the following years new versions were published intended to solicit feedback from accessibility experts and members of the disability community.
On 27 April 2006 a "Last Call Working Draft" was published. In April 2008 the guidelines became a "Candidate Recommendation". On 3 November 2008 the guidelines became a "Proposed Recommendation". In early 2014, WCAG 2.0's Level A and Level AA success criteria were incorporated as references in clause 9.2 ("Web content requirements") of the European standard EN 301 549 published by ETSI. EN 301 549 was produced in response to a mandate that the European Commission gave to the three official European standardisation bodies (CEN, CENELEC and ETSI) and is the first European standard for ICT products and services. Nine new criteria make their definitive debut in this new version of the WCAG standard. New sections have also been introduced that detail aspects of the specification which may impact privacy and security. In early 2021, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group presented the first public working draft (FPWD) of the future WCAG 3.0, intended to provide a range of recommendations for making web content more accessible.
The 2021 FPWD introduced a new color contrast method as part of WCAG 3.0, as a candidate to replace the existing WCAG 2.x contrast specification. The new method, called the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA), is currently being beta tested. It should be made clear that no part of WCAG 3.0 is an official recommendation. WCAG 3.0 is a draft undergoing significant development efforts, and the expected release date as an official recommendation is not defined. WCAG 1.0 consist of 14 guidelines-each of which describes a general principle of accessible design. Each guideline covers a basic theme of web accessibility and is associated with one or more checkpoints that describes how to apply that guideline to particular webpage features. Priority 1: Web developers must satisfy these requirements, otherwise it will be impossible for one or more groups to access the Web content. Priority 2: Web developers should satisfy these requirements, otherwise some groups will find it difficult to access the Web content.
Conformance to this level is described as AA or Double-A. Priority 3: Web developers may satisfy these requirements to make it easier for some groups to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as AAA or Triple-A. WCAG 2.0 consist of twelve guidelines organized under four principles (websites must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust). Each guideline has testable success criteria (61 in all). The techniques are periodically updated whereas the principles, guidelines and success criteria are stable and do not change. WCAG 2.0 uses the same three levels of conformance (A, AA, AAA) as WCAG 1.0, but has redefined them. WCAG 2.1 is backwards-compatible with WCAG 2.0, which it extends with a further 17 success criteria. WCAG 2.2 is backwards-compatible with WCAG 2.1 extending it a further nine success criteria and with WCAG 2.0 extending it a further 26 success criteria (including the 17 success criteria introduced by WCAG 2.1). Additionally, WCAG 2.2 has deprecated and removed the 4.1.1 success criterion.
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