Concepts

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international, public-interest, non-profit organization where member organizations, full-time staff and the public work together to develop Web standards.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the accessibility standards developed by the W3C. These standards apply to web pages, software, electronic documents and digital interfaces. These guidelines outline success criteria and cover a wide range of recommendations for making accessible digital content.

The W3C refers to principles, guidelines and success criteria as the "Layers of Guidance" for accessibility conformance.

Layers of Guidance

Principles

Each of the guidelines falls into one of four principles. The acronym P.O.U.R. is a common mnemonic to recall these categories:

• P: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
• O: User interface components and navigation must be operable.
• U: Information and the operation must be understandable.
• R: Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by various web browsers and assistive technologies.

Guidelines

Guidelines are the goals for each of the four principles. The guidelines are not testable and explain what is needed to meet compliance for digital accessibility.

Success Criteria

Testable success criteria are used to evaluate levels of conformance. Success criteria are categorized by three levels of conformance: A (lowest), AA, AAA (highest).

Example: Prerecorded video

• A: captions are provided
• AA: audio descriptions are provided for visual information
• AAA: sign language interpretation is provided

Clemson University's digital accessibility standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, level AA (WCAG 2.1 AA). Level AA conformance includes both level A and level AA success criteria.

The following pages provide an overview of fundamental accessibility concepts. They include links to related WCAG success criteria and techniques for common authoring tools like Word, PowerPoint and Canvas.