Laws and Standards

WCAG is the recommendation organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) project. It was written by an international panel of accessibility experts and is comprised of three priority levels.

• Priority Level 1 (A): must.

  A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

• Priority Level 2 (AA): should.

  A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

• Priority Level 3 (AAA): may.

  A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

View this Checklist for WCAG 1.0 for an easy way to gauge accessibility compliance on your next web project.

Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act is a United States law outlining minimum levels of accessibility for electronic resources. All government agencies and contractors dealing with these agencies are required to be Section 508 compliant. Unfortunately, this is still largely unenforced.

Section 508 is largely similar to WCAG Priority Level 1. View Jim Thatcher’s side-by-side comparison of Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 for an in-depth comparison of the differences between the two.

Accessibility laws in other countries vary greatly. Some countries enforce no web accessibility standards, and some countries’ standards are more strict than Section 508. See the Disability Rights Commission and the Royal National Institute of the Blind for information regarding laws in the UK.