GOAL: Produce content that doesn’t create barriers for people with disabilities.
Commonwealth and state law make disability discrimination unlawful. Organisations with websites that aren’t accessible to people with disabilities risk complaints and prosecution.
Accessibility is considered a human right under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Australia has signed and ratified this convention.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have been endorsed by the Australian Government, as part of its Digital Standard. The Guidelines were first released in 1999. The current version is WCAG 2.1.
Go to our article WCAG 2.1 summary for web writers
Checklist
| Text alternatives for images |
- Decorative images have a blank text alternative
- Informative or functional images have an appropriate short or long text alternative
- Text alternatives are equivalent to the information provided by the image, except for images of artwork which have a descriptive identification
- Where a long text alternative is used, the image has an ALT text that labels the image and says where the long text version is
- Where a long text version is provided on a linked page, a link back to the original page is included
- Captions are not repeated as the ALT text
- Captioned images have a short label as the ALT text
|
| Colour |
- Colour is not used on its own to convey meaning
|
| Contrast |
- Colours used for text and images of text offer strong contrast (4.5:1) against the background colour
- Colours used in parts of graphics that need to be legible offer strong contrast (3:1) against adjacent colours
|
| Images of text |
- Text is styles, not embedded in images (except for logos, screenshots, graphs, maps, diagrams or where the text is decorative or incidental)
|
References
