WCAGs Cousins – ATAG, UAAG, PDF/UA

Join Natalie and Natalie in the twelfth episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they explore the lesser-known cousins of WCAG: ATAG, UAAG, and PDF/UA. They discuss the importance of these guidelines for authoring tools, user agents, and PDFs and explore how implementing them can significantly enhance web accessibility. The episode also touches on the real-world implications and the responsibilities of tool developers in creating accessible software.

Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. My name is Natalie G, and with me today is,

Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees.

Natalie Garza: Yes, thank you for joining us today, Natalie.

Natalie MacLees: Thanks for having me.

Natalie Garza: Yes, this is the twelfth episode, and in this podcast episode, we’re gonna talk about WCAG’s cousins. Let’s talk about cousins. They are ATAG, UAAG, and PDF/UA.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I’m pretty sure those are the official names.

Natalie Garza: Yes, we’re gonna go over each one.

Natalie MacLees: The other accessibility guidelines.

Natalie Garza: Yes, the not-so-mentioned, often forgotten, but they’re here, and we’re gonna talk about them. Alright, Natalie, what is, what is WCAG? It’s just a refresher for our audience.

Natalie MacLees: WCAG, W C A G, stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it’s what applies to any kind of online content or software, even though the name is web content. So like online web apps and things like that, it also applies.

Natalie Garza: Yes, and I feel like if you put any attention into the accessibility space, that’s all you hear. WCAG this, WCAG that.

Natalie MacLees: Yes, you do hear it a lot. People talk about WCAG a lot and they don’t talk about its cousins.

Natalie Garza: What are the cousins, Natalie? We want to start with ATAG?

Natalie MacLees: I usually say A-TAG, but okay, we can call it whatever you want. ATAG, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. You’ll notice they all end in A G because they’re all accessibility guidelines. And this is a set of guidelines meant for authoring tools. So things like your favorite CMS. Whether that’s Drupal, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.

There’s literally hundreds of them at this point and ATAG should be applying to all of these things. Unfortunately, it is not very evenly implemented. And ATAG aims to do two things with an authoring tool. Number one, it aims to try to make sure that people with disabilities can use the tool. And, so in that way, it’s all of the WCAG rules just applied to, you know, the admin editing interface of, you know, WordPress or whatever to make sure that if you’re using a screen reader or your keyboard only, or, you know, whatever kind of assistive technology you’re using, you can go in and write blog posts and add images and all of those kinds of things. The other part of ATAG is to help you, as an author, make sure that your content that you’re creating is accessible. And so it should have little tips and little warnings that show up. If you try to put white text on a pale yellow background, you should see some kind of warning come up that just says, “Oh, hey, you might want to pick a different color here. This isn’t accessible.” It should have little reminders, “oh...