How to Meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines teaches you how to pass every guideline from the web’s most powerful accessibility standards.
The book covers each guideline in detail, including:
- background to help you understand the context
- how to pass
- any exceptions
- tips and tricks to make your life easier
- shortcuts to meeting multiple guidelines together.
WCAG and web accessibility can seem daunting
While everyone seems to agree web accessibility is important, not enough developers know how to incorporate it into their builds.
That’s because it’s often presented in dense and dry language, with all the options you can imagine included in the passing criteria.
That’s not the fault of the W3C (the group who author and maintain the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Their job is to make sure that every facet of the guidelines - every method to pass or fail them - is written down and referenceable.
But if the guidelines are already written down and available online, why isn’t it part of every developer’s stack?
Developers - like you - are busy and under pressure to deliver. You don’t have time to go and research the twenty ways you could pass a guideline - you need one way that will work.
That’s where I come in. I’ve taught thousands of developers web accessibility since 2012. In my book, I have reviewed every guideline and slimmed it down to a few simple points to ensure that you can build an accessible website without adding endlessly to your project.
You want to build accessible websites; this book shows you how.
Since 2012, I’ve taught thousands of developers how to build accessible websites that meet WCAG. Some were building complex eCommerce websites, others government and university websites and some just wanted their personal projects more accessible.
Web accessibility isn’t easy. Deciding which of WCAG’s three conformance levels and which techniques to use to pass them needs experience.
You need to know:
- Why the guideline exists - what problem is it trying to solve for users?
- How to pass the guideline - in simple terms, using HTML wherever possible
- What to ignore - what types of content are exempt from the guideline?
- Tips to tackle multiple guidelines together
My book uses these headings as a simple structure to explain how you can pass every guideline.
You don’t need to learn every technique for meeting every guideline at every level. You need to know how to make your website accessible - whether you’re starting a new build or reviewing something that’s already live.
The best way to do that is lean on the experience of someone who has been teaching web accessibility and WCAG for over a decade. That’s exactly what I’ve put into my book.
Learn once and apply the guidelines to your work forever
I’ve written a workbook you can follow for every future project. Whether you know which level of conformance you need to meet or are deciding for yourself, you’ll see which guidelines apply (and which don’t) and be able to work your way through them each time.
No matter how many websites you create that follow WCAG, you’ll always be able to refer back to the book to ensure you have checked off everything you need to.
Luke McGrath has been writing about web accessibility and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines since 2012 and WCAG 2.0. In the last decade he has helped thousands of web developers, content managers and business owners understand and implement WCAG. In 2024, he fully updated and rewrote his textbook for WCAG 2.2.
