Standards & Specifications

[00:00:00]
>> Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the standards and guidelines, and we'll use these web specific standards. To kind of guide and shape all of the features that we build and all the stuff that we talk about going forward, so there's kind of three main things to know.

[00:00:15]
These all fall under the W3C, which is the standards body that's responsible for HTML and CSS as well. So there is the actual specification, the web content, and accessibility guidelines, we'll dive into this WCAG. So this is a good access acronym to know, there's the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, so this is the group itself, the group is way.

[00:00:37]
And then while the WCAG kind of specifies what is necessary, there's also this WAI-ARIA spec, which kind of helps make rich Internet applications, or, robust applications, more accessible. So maybe a quick show of hands, has anybody ever seen or added an ARIA tag to their HTML already? Like an aria?

[00:00:58]
Okay, cool, so a lot of people, that's great, yeah. So it's like even people who haven't done specialized accessibility work often have at least seen them existing in HTML before. Whether it's like ARIA labeled by or described by or maybe a role or something like that, is a really nice way to get your feet wet with accessibility, great.

[00:01:15]
So yeah, these are the three main groups to know, so there's the kind of core group under W3C, they put out this standard of the guidelines. And then they also work on a specification for making HTML more rich and giving it new APIs so you can do new things with it.

[00:01:31]
So the W3C, for those not familiar, is the World Wide Web Consortium, and they're an international standards body. So again, their main kind of standards that they work on are HTML, CSS, and accessibility. I mentioned earlier that I sit on TC 39, which is under a different standards body, which is ECMA.

[00:01:51]
And so there's kind of this distinction where things that go into the JavaScript language, like your arrow functions and constant let things like that. Those fall under the purview of ECMA, whereas browser specific APIs, like maybe the Performance API, those fall under the umbrella of the W3C. This is really just for publishing and legal reasons, in truth, the groups often work pretty well together, and things kind of get slated into the appropriate group based on the feature.

[00:02:18]
But the W3C is great, they're like a big open consortium, they publish all of their notes, all of their standards documents, everything like that. And they are very easy to contribute to, so yeah, you can kind of get started by checking out w3.org so way, as I mentioned, is this web accessibility initiative.

[00:02:36]
So they are a group or an initiative underneath the umbrella of the W3C, and their job is to basically have this focus on accessibility and create and publish accessibility specifications. So the WAI are the authors of WCAG, which is the specification itself, and you can check out more on them on the w3.org/ WAI website.

[00:02:56]
And then WCAG itself is the standard published by WAI, these acronyms are a little bit similar. So I kind of just wanted to go through this to make sure we understand, what is a group, what is a document, and what is the overarching standards body. So, yeah, so they always have their standards up to date posted on their website.

[00:03:13]
And this is great, as we go into these accessibility tools like Lighthouse and these linters and things like that, they are creating their rules off of this document. So the document is the standard, and then everybody else makes tools that enforce or detect rule violations in the document.

[00:03:30]
And then the last thing is WAI-ARIA, so this is a crossover, it is a standard as well as this kind of robust set of APIs implemented by HTML. So WAI will decide that we need some way of doing some new cool thing, and they'll make a standard for it, and the standard will get approved.

[00:03:48]
And then HTML will pick that up and implement it in the form of ARIA tags or roles or something like that, that belong to HTML buttons or elements. Cool, one other group that I really like, so we're kind of done with the official standard stuff now, is there's this independent advocacy group called WebAIM that I'm a very big fan of.

[00:04:06]
They sort of parse through the spec and the standard, and they come up with these very easy to digest sets of rules. That are like, hey, I read the standard, and this is what it says about focus elements, like you need a ring, and it needs this contrast, and it needs a visual indicator.

[00:04:20]
And so they have a website, webaim.org, and as we go through the course, I often will use WebAIM because they have these really well constructed, easy to digest rules. But WebAIM is really just basing those rules off of the standard itself, so I think WebAIM is just this independent group that provides some very nice, easy to digest ways of interpreting the specs.

[00:04:39]
So we're not all sitting and reading through this like 10,000 page spec, basically. Cool, so within accessibility there are conformance levels, and so we'll see this quite a bit, I think. I already had a few slides that mentioned AA before, but there's basically A, AA and AAA. And A is the lowest level of conformance, AA is mid range, AAA is highest.

[00:05:02]
And so basically the tldr, if we wanted to get away from it, is we should try to stick AA compliant. That's usually where the legal ramifications come in, is failing to adhere to AA compliance. However, I think that AAA compliance is just excellent to read if you wanna know how to take your application to that next level.

[00:05:19]
From being technically usable to being really robust and enjoyable to people with disabilities. So for the legal side, we'll focus on AA, but we'll often throughout this course talk about what is mentioned in the AAA compliance because I think doing a little bit of extra work can make a huge impact.

[00:05:36]
Cool, and then the last thing to cover over here is this concept that WCAG puts out called the POUR principles, I really like them, they're just kind of a high level way of thinking about accessibility. So POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, and then each section has this little perceivable.

[00:05:55]
Users can recognize either via sight, hearing, or touch the information, operable means they can navigate and operate the website using input methods. So kind of distilling these things down, like the information that you receive, should be receivable either in one of these three ways. And then using the website, like your buttons, your forms, things like that, users should be able to do that.

[00:06:15]
Understandable, the content needs to make sense, and then robust would be basically like if you have these assistive technologies. There's basically support for all of them in order to kind of interact with the website and use it. So I kind of like thinking about these things as the overarching concepts when we're making our websites accessible, like making sure that they theoretically meet all four of these categories.