Getting certified in web accessibility
Accessibility is an important consideration whenever you’re building an application, so in my quest to become a better software developer I thought I’d get a bit more educated about it!
But where do we start? There’s a standard out there called WCAG. There’s also the word ARIA thrown around sometimes. So let’s start by googling that.
Quick research
I was quickly met with a soup of acronyms. Let’s do a recap:
- W3C — World Wide Web Consortium
- W3C WAI — W3C Accessibility Initiative
- WCAG — Web Accessibility Guidelines
- ATAG — Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
- UAAG — User Agent Accessibility Guidelines
- WAI-ARIA — Accessible Rich Internet Applications
- WCAG AA compliance — within the WCAG there are different levels of compliance: A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest). Most organisations will aim for AA, as AAA is very hard or, for some types of content, impossible to reach.
- A11y — sometimes used as short for the word “accessibility”, because letters are expensive!
Recommended introductory pages:
Finding a course
I was sure that W3C and MDN would be good sources on the topic. But what I’d like is to get some kind of a certification to have something to show for my work.
Lo and behold, there is this page that lists WAI courses. There’s even a course on building your own WAI course — this is meta!
No time to loose, so I went for the course by W3C. It comes with an optional certificate which is exactly what I was looking for.
This is actually an edX course, mind you, so let’s recover the password from our dusty account and let’s go!
A few hours later — did I learn anything?
Although I was expceting something a bit more technical (it was meant for a very broad audience), I actually learned quite a bit during this course.
Some examples:
- How people with disabilities actually use the web (including the different kind of assistive technologies and adaptive strategies)
- The essential components of accessibility
- The four principles of the web accessibility guidelines:
- perceivable
- operable
- understandable
- robust
- How around 15 to 20% of people require accessibility — over 1 billion worldwide (!)
- The business case for considering accessibility
Should you do the same?
I don’t really know what good will come of this yet, but I doubt this formation will really impress any potential employer (if that’s your objective). I think many people get certified out of a requirement from their employer / industry.
However, if you are interested and have the time for it, then just go for it!