Digital accessibility isn’t just about compliance—it’s about empowering all users, including those with disabilities. By ensuring that websites, mobile apps, and technologies are usable by everyone, you create inclusive experiences that benefit users with vision, hearing, physical, and cognitive challenges. This approach expands your reach to a broader audience, making the digital world more accessible for everyone.

Ensuring Accessible Digital Spaces: The Role of WCAG

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) creates guidelines and standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to support these objectives.

Understanding the principles of digital accessibility is crucial. POUR, an acronym representing the four key principles of digital accessibility, forms the foundation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):

• Perceivable: Ensuring that information and user interface components are presented in ways that all users can perceive. This could involve providing text alternatives for non-text content or using sufficient color contrast.
• Operable: Designing interface components and navigation that are operable by all users, which includes making all functionality available via keyboard interfaces and providing users enough time to read and use the content.
• Understandable: Ensuring that information and the operation of the user interface are understandable, which can involve making text readable and predictable and providing input assistance when necessary.
• Robust: Creating content that a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies, can reliably interpret, which involves ensuring compatibility with current and future user tools.

Ultimately, digital accessibility is about people. It’s about ensuring that everyone, regardless of their abilities, has equal access to digital content and information. Let’s make the digital world accessible for all! As web developers, designers, and digital content creators, you have the power to make this a reality.

We encourage you to explore these guidelines on the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative website and learn how you can help make digital content more accessible for all users.

Questions?

If you have questions about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, contact the IT Accessibility Center at itaccessibilitycenter@missouri.edu.