The Silver Accessibility Guidelines is major revision that will be the successor to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.x. This specification creates a new framework and guidelines to make web content and applications accessible to people with disabilities, supporting a wider set of user needs, using new approaches to testing, and allowing more frequent maintenance of guidelines to keep pace with accelerating technology change. Each guideline in the new standard will focus on user needs rather than structural features or types of content, and will be supported by technology-specific methods to meet that need. Content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 is expected to substantially conform to a conformance level of the new standard, though the new standard is expected to have many differences from WCAG 2.x.
"Silver Accessibility Guidelines" is a temporary project name. The formal name is still under discussion. This will be removed when the CfC on the Silver name is approved and the name is updated throughout the ED.
This is an Editor's Draft for the Silver Accessibility Guidelines project, published by the Silver Community Group. This document illustrates:
The purpose of this draft is to get feedback and discussion to inform and refine the structure and conformance model. We expect feedback and discussion as part of the public review. The content is only an example of the structure and is not content that is approved by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG). The Silver task force and AGWG will continue to expand this draft while addressing public comments. Revisions will be announced and user testing will be conducted.
The Silver Editor's Draft is published as a joint effort of the Silver Task Force of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and of the W3C Silver Community Group. It is a work in progress, and comments are welcome as Github Issues or by email as described in the following paragraph.
People with disabilities can face problems using online content and applications. Disabilities can be permanent, temporary, or recurring limitations
We need guidelines to:
The Silver Accessibility Guidelines cover a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities and combinations of these; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content and applications on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices and emerging technologies on the web such as web XR (augmented, virtual and mixed reality) and voice input. It can be applied to other content addressed by the W3C. Following these guidelines will also often make content more usable to users in general as well as accessible to individuals with disabilities.
During the year of research conducte by the Silver Community Group and their research partners, a recurring theme was the popularity and quality of the guidance in WCAG 2.0. Most of the opportunities identified in the research were improvements in the structure and presentation of accessibility guidance to:
The goal of the Silver Accessibility Guidlelines is to provide information that can be used to improve the accessibility of products when using the guidelines on a variety of platforms. It will use a different framework to allow it to address more disability needs, address publishing requirements and emerging technologies on the web such as web XR (augmented, virtual and mixed reality) and voice input. It will provide non-normative information about the ways web technologies need to work with authoring tools, user agents, and assistive technologies. This framework is intended to support better coverage across disabilities, and be easier to maintain, so that the new framework will be more durable over time as technologies evolve. This will require development of a new conformance model, engaging policy makers in that process, and testing the model with policy makers from different settings. Adapted from the AGWG Charter Scope.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was designed to be technology neutral, and has stayed relevant for over 10 years. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 has been implemented in open source authoring tool communities (chiefly Wordpress and Drupal) with little known uptake in commercial authoring tools. UAAG 2.0 offers useful guidance to user agent developers and has been implemented on an individual success criterion basis. There is no known user agent that has implemented all of UAAG 2.0. These guidelines have normative guidance for content and helpful implementation advice for authoring tools, user agents and assistive technologies.
Since the new standard will use a different conformance model, the Working Group expects that some organizations may wish to continue using WCAG 2.x, while others may wish to migrate to the new standard. For those that wish to migrate to the new standard, the Working Group will provide transition support materials, which may use mapping and / or other approaches to facilitate migration.
Guidelines are requirements that need to be met. They are normative, which means they are required. The Methods (listed in the Explanation section for each Guideline) show the ways that the requirement can be met. The Methods for each guideline are more flexible. They are informative, which means they are not requirements, they are techniques, explanations, and tests that an author can use to meet the required guideline.
WCAG 2.x has normative success criteria as requirements. The Silver research showed that the structure of normative success criteria was difficult to understand and made it difficult to include needs of people with disabilities that were not conducive to a binary true/false success criterion. Silver attempts to solve that problem by having Guidelines in plain language that are normative requirements and apply broadly across platforms. The specific tests to evaluate the Guidelines are in informative Methods. This solution is intended to provide greater flexibility to include the needs of people with disabilities that could not be included in the WCAG 2.x structure.
The headings below are guidelines, which map approximately to WCAG 2.x success critera. The How-to link for each guideline opens explanatory material which maps approximately to WCAG 2.x Understanding. The Methods for each guideline are linked in the How-to. They map to WCAG 2.x Techniques. The process of migrating information from WCAG 2.x to Silver has just begun. There are samples below to give an example of how the structure works. You may want to first look at the template for the new content to see the skeleton of the architecture before looking at the early drafts of the guidelines.
| WCAG 2 maps to | Silver | |
|---|---|---|
| Success Criteria | Guidelines | |
| Techniques | Methods | |
| Understanding | How-to |
How to Template and Method template give an overview of the structure for content.
These are early drafts of guidelines. They are used to illustrate what Silver could look like and to test the process of writing content. These guideline drafts should not be considered as final content of Silver. They are there to show how the structure would work. As this draft matures, numbering of individual guidelines will be removed to improve overall usability of the guidelines in response to public requests. Guidelines will be identified by unique name. Translations should have an appropriate unique name.
As more content is developed, this section will be a list of normative guidelines with a unique short name, and the text of the requirement written in plain language. To see the overall plan for migrating content from WCAG 2.1 to Silver, see the WCAG to Silver Outline Map.
Use headings and sub-headings for your text. Headings — including titles and subtitles — organize words and images on a web page.
Headings is the first guideline that Silver worked on as part of the prototyping process. It migrated WCAG 2.4.10 Section Headings. It is a draft that illustrate the Silver architecture. It should not be considered finished.
Use clear language to make it easier for readers to understand.
Clear Language is a new guideline proposed by the Cognitive Accessibility Task Force (COGA), and includes research, documents and comments from COGA. It showcases a proof-of-concept example of a rubric-type test that could not be included in WCAG 2.x.
Provide sufficient contrast between foreground text and its background.
Visual Contrast of Text How-to
Visual Contrast is a migration from WCAG 2.1 with significant updates:
We propose changing the name of “Color Contrast” to “Visual Contrast” as a signal of a paradigm change from one about color to one about “perception of light intensity”. The reason for this change is that the understanding of contrast has matured and the available research and body of knowledge has made breakthroughs in advancing the understanding of “visual contrast”.
The proposed new guidance more accurately models current research in human visual perception of contrast and light intensity. The goal is to improve understanding of the functional needs of all users, and more effectively match the needs of those who face barriers accessing content. This new perception-based model is more context dependent than a strict light ratio measurement; results can, for example, vary with size of text and the darkness of the colors or page.
This model is more responsive to user needs and allows designers more choice in visual presentation. It does this by including multi-factor assessment tests which integrate contrast with interrelated elements of visual readability, such as font features. It includes tests to determine an upper limit of contrast, where elevated contrast may impact usability.
This section is under development. Comments are welcome.
A conformance claim or following the recommended scoring below is optional.
When the Silver Task Force researched WCAG 2.0, they found that, generally, people like WCAG guidance but wanted changes to the structure, including the conformance. The major issues that Silver conformance addresses are:
Scoring and Conformance is divided into the following sections:
The goals are based on the Silver research, the results from the Silver Design Sprint, and input from the Silver Community Group and Task Force.
We aren’t losing content, we are restructuring
As technology advances, the WCAG 2.x scope of an individual page becomes more limiting and a flexible way is needed. Needs vary by factors that include but are not limited to: size; complexity; dynamic content; statefulness; frequency of publishing; third-party integrations; custom and scoped web components; critical user flows; etc.
The organization (author) should consider its own factors and determine the scope of what they are claiming. This allows the scope of the claim to be narrower than the entire site or product. Examples: a newspaper might have a different claim for the crosswords section than for the news section; or an app may have a different scope than the main website.
An organization can't claim conformance for broader scope than they have identified and tested, unless they have followed the rules for representative sampling in the Sampling section.
Each guideline awards a percentage of a point. A perfect accessibility score would be 100%, and a complete failure is 0%. All points count towards an overall total. The site or product tested must meet a minimum score for each disability category. The categories are based on the EN301 549 Functional Performance Statements, but will need more categories such as needs of people with vestibular disorders and a detailed breakdown of cognitive disability categories.
The overall points total contribute to the level of conformance achieved. Bronze is the lowest level of conformance; Silver is the middle level of conformance; and Gold is the highest level of conformance that can be met. Higher point totals will be needed to reach higher levels of conformance. We'll need more research to determine where the break points will be.
Note: We've chosen these level names since they’re understood internationally and are easily translated.
Sampling helps give confidence whether people building the product, app, site, or digital property have done the accessibility work that makes the product more accessible to people with disabilities. Sampling gives an indication of where you are in accessibility, but it doesn't guarantee that the tester finds every problem. It's particularly effective when a product or site is built with accessible components. The more a site is created from a set of components, the more you want to get those components accessible.
Representative sampling is a way to assess large properties without having to test every screen. Representative sampling is common in accessibility testing, partcularly for manual testing. Sampling is optional. Anyone who wants to test all their pages or screens can do so.
There are many approaches to sampling. Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0) is web-oriented, but the principles can be applied more broadly.
Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0) has helpful information. See the following sections on choosing a representative sample. They will need minor modifications to make them more broadly applicable than web pages.
Notes from discussion
The following people participated in the Design Sprint of 2018 held in San Diego, California prior to the CSUN AT 2018 conference. We thank them for the generous gift of time that they donated to the Silver project.
These researchers selected a Silver research question, did the research, and graciously allowed us to use the results.