Conformance
For the purpose of Accessibility Conformance, Web Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have been adopted or adapted by the vast majority of governments, including Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or Israel.
In the United States, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a subset of WCAG 2.0, is used as the official legislation.
Accessibility Conformance makes business sense, as it increases your user base, and is mandatory for products used by Government entities, NGOs, Education, and industries such as Travel. This will change depending on country, and have in mind lawsuits against inaccessible products are frequent.
The guidelines included in this book are based on WCAG 2.0, while references to web and desktop have been replaced with their iOS equivalents, the original goals have been respected to ensure Accessibility Conformance.
Accessibility Conformance validation is a manual process as there are currently no automated tools for this purpose.
To aid you with Accessibility Conformance validation I’ve included in this book a section titled “Accessibility Semantics Audit” (ASA).
Additionally, if you’re targeting the US market, the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template® (VPAT®) will help you document your product’s conformance with Section 508. Within VPAT, the section you’re looking is “Section 1194.21 Software Applications and Operating Systems”.
IMPORTANT: No tool or process will provide a complete guarantee your product is Accessible to everyone, even if it conforms to all Accessibility Guidelines, due to the unpredictable nature of impairments, users may still encounter challenges when using your product. Conversely, a product that does not comply to some Accessibility Guidelines may still be Accessible as the supported guidelines may account for all the needs of a specific user.
Accessibility Semantics Audit
The Accessibility Semantics Audit (ASA) helps quickly determine a basic level of Accessibility Conformance, below Single-A, for individual user interface elements.
While Single-A is required to conform with Government legislation, ASA-level conformance still provides significant value at a very low cost.
The value of ASA lies in the effort to reward ratio. First, the simple querying of every user interface element with 6 straightforward questions (e.g. Where am I?), results in a preliminary Accessibility Compliance status.
Second, applications created with built-in user interface components leave few questions unanswered, filling in the gaps is not only easy, but also goes a long way to meeting many of the Accessibility Guidelines which only require the presence of Accessibility Semantics, and facilitates Automated Testing.
The following is a list of questions, along with their description and answer information.