WCAG

WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is a set of guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) that provides recommendations for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It covers a broad range of barriers related to vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive function and aims to enable a wider audience to perceive, understand, and interact with web content.

WCAG is organized around four core principles known by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Under these principles, the guidelines and their testable success criteria help developers and content creators ensure accessibility throughout the web experience. The guidelines define conformance levels commonly labeled A, AA, and AAA, with most organizations targeting AA. Examples include providing text alternatives for nontext content, ensuring sufficient color contrast, enabling keyboard navigation, and offering captions and transcripts for multimedia.

The guidelines are maintained by WAI and have been widely adopted as an international standard for web accessibility. In some jurisdictions, WCAG-based conformance is referenced in law or procurement requirements; in the United States, federal and state agencies have used WCAG-driven criteria, while European measures also align with WCAG concepts. ISO has published an international standard that adapts WCAG for formal conformity. Conformance is demonstrated through evaluation that combines automated checks with human review, and claims are typically tied to a specific WCAG version and level.