How to tell everybody that your webpage is ok

On Conformance

Once you have tested your webpages, you want to tell everyone that you have cared about accessibility. In WCAG 1.0 you had the fancy logos, but they had a great problem: everybody could use them despite of being accessible or not.

Nowadays, the W3C is unable to verify each website that uses the logo, so the WAI tries to fix this problem using the new logos with a conformance claim.

Both conformance icons and claims refer to a single webpage, unless the webmaster includes an explicit scope information explaining which pages are covered by the claim and the icon. The pages can be a series of pages (e.g. a checkout) or multiple related webpages (e.g. a subdomain).

What to include in your conformance claim

If you use a conformance claim, there is required and optional information you should provide.

The required information

The date of the claim.
The guidelines you have followed: title, version and URI “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/“
The conformance level of the webpages: Level Single-A, Double-A or Triple-A.
A brief description of the webpages, with the URIs or an expression that describes the URIs.
Web content technologies used (PDF, flash…) and, if they are turned off or unsupported, it will not conform (relied upon). A link to official software that can renders this content is recommended.

Optional Components

You may include also in your conformance claim:

Which success criteria your webpage have passed beyond the level of conformance claimed. Moreover, include information about any additional steps taken that go beyond the success criteria to enhance accessibility.
Technologies that are used but an accessible, standard alternative is provided (not relied upon).
Which user agents, including assistive technologies you have used to test the content.
A metadata version of the specific technologies relied upon.
A metadata version of the conformance claim.

In the next post, I will give examples and explain how to use metadata versions in conformance claims.

If you don’t want to tell anybody….

If you are really cool, you can conform to WCAG 2.0 without making any claim, because conformance claims are not required. Just be good at your job!