Seyfarth Synopsis: The World Wide Web Consortium just published an expanded version of the WCAG to add 17 more requirements to address new technologies and other digital barriers for individuals with disabilities.
On June 5, the private body of web accessibility experts called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its update to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, aptly named the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level 2.1.
The WCAG 2.1 is an extension of the WCAG 2.0 which the W3C issued in 2008. In recent years, WCAG 2.0 AA has become the generally-accepted set of technical requirements for making websites, mobile apps, and other digital content accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG 2.0 AA is the legal standard for the primary websites of airline carriers as well as the websites of federal agencies.
Four years in the making, WCAG 2.1 "fills gaps" in WCAG 2.0 by adding 17 additional success criteria to address additional accessibility barriers. The updates are mainly related to mobile devices (to keep up with significant technological changes since 2008), disabilities that affect vision (such as colorblindness, low vision; and criteria addressing text spacing and non-text color contrast), and disabilities that affect cognitive function (such as attention deficit disorder and age-related cognitive decline; and criteria addressing timeouts and animations from interactions for seizures and physical reactions). The W3C designed 2.1 to apply broadly to different web technologies now and in the future, and to be testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation. The W3C provides an informative introduction to WCAG here.
"Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general."
The WCAG Level 2.0 AA has been widely considered the de facto standard for website accessibility in the United States, even though the Department of Justice has not adopted it into its Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations applicable to public accommodations. The W3C's publication of WCAG 2.1 does not change that equation; it merely adds additional elements for companies to address in making their websites accessible. 2.1 builds on 2.0, and will still follow the A, AA, and AAA conformance levels. The few court decisions that have issued an order requiring companies to conform their websites to a standard for accessibility have used WCAG 2.0 AA. Given the rather incremental changes in 2.1, we expect WCAG 2.1 AA to eventually be the new "de facto" standard, but do not expect courts to require websites that already conform to 2.0 AA to meet all 2.1 AA standards overnight.
Further out on the horizon is the W3C's Silver initiative, which we hear will reimagine the accessibility guidelines completely. However, there's no need to worry about that yet.
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