Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, W3C Recommendation 5-May-1999.
These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines are intended for all Web content developers (page authors and site designers) and for developers of authoring tools. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (e.g., desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (e.g., noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, etc.). Following these guidelines will also help people find information on the Web more quickly. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.
This is a reference document for accessibility principles and design ideas. Some of the strategies discussed in this document address certain Web internationalization and mobile access concerns. However, this document focuses on accessibility and does not fully address the related concerns of other W3C Activities. Please consult the W3C Mobile Access Activity home page and the W3C Internationalization Activity home page for more information.
This document is meant to be stable and therefore does not provide specific information about browser support for different technologies as that information changes rapidly. Instead, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web site provides such information (refer to [WAI-UA-SUPPORT]).
This document includes an appendix that organizes all of the checkpoints by topic and priority. The checkpoints in the appendix link to their definitions in the current document. The topics identified in the appendix include images, multimedia, tables, frames, forms, and scripts. The appendix is available as either a tabular summary of checkpoints or as a simple list of checkpoints.
A separate document, entitled "Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" ([TECHNIQUES]), explains how to implement the checkpoints defined in the current document. The Techniques Document discusses each checkpoint in more detail and provides examples using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), and the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML). The Techniques Document also includes techniques for document validation and testing, and an index of HTML elements and attributes (and which techniques use them). The Techniques Document has been designed to track changes in technology and is expected to be updated more frequently than the current document. Note. Not all browsers or multimedia tools may support the features described in the guidelines. In particular, new features of HTML 4.0 or CSS 1 or CSS 2 may not be supported.
"Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" is part of a series of accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative. The series also includes User Agent Accessibility Guidelines ([WAI-USERAGENT]) and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines ([WAI-AUTOOLS]).
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, W3C Recommendation 11 December 2008.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.
WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria, is provided in separate documents. See Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview for an introduction and links to WCAG technical and educational material.
WCAG 2.0 succeeds Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [WCAG10], which was published as a W3C Recommendation May 1999. Although it is possible to conform either to WCAG 1.0 or to WCAG 2.0 (or both), the W3C recommends that new and updated content use WCAG 2.0. The W3C also recommends that Web accessibility policies reference WCAG 2.0.