WCAG 2.0: a new step towards integration of people with disabilities

Once with the great pace of development of the World Wide Web, a new important problem appears: how to make the Internet accessible for the people with disabilities?

As an answer to this question appeared the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document, first version 1.0, and more recently the 2.0 version. It covers a great range of recommendations that would enable the Internet to be much more accessible. After following these recommendations from W3C, a wider range of people with disabilities, such as blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, cognitive limitations, photo-sensitivity, learning disabilities and combinations of these. Also, these guidelines would help you make the content of your site more sensitive to users in general. The most important thing that was done by the WCAG developers was that they were able to define a notion of the word “accessible”, that can be applied to the online technologies. They made a great accent on the usability, regardless of the deficiency one has.

The recommendations included in WCAG 2.0 are not technically specific, meaning that they could be implemented on different platform and operating systems. WCAG 2.0 is being extended and supported in a series of additional document, Understanding WCAG 2.0 and Techniques for WCAG 2.0. These documents do not have a formal status and help the user or developer to better understand the requirements of implementation of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0 succeeds the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which were published as a W3C recommendation in May 1999. Now, it is possible to conform to either 1.0 version of the document, or to 2.0 (or even both), but the W3c recommends the usage of 2.0 version for the new, updated content.

By implementing the new WCAG specifications on every site, we can open a new era of opening the Internet for all the categories of people, regardless of their disabilities.