Launching WCAG in Plain English

Join co-hosts Natalie Garza and accessibility expert Natalie MacLees in the 20th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. They discuss their latest project, WCAG in Plain English, a collection of simplified articles derived from the official WCAG guidelines.

The project aims to make WCAG requirements more understandable and accessible to everyone, with clear language, illustrations, and a redesigned organization.

Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. My name is Natalie Garz, and I’m the co-host. And with me today is,

Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, your cohost.

Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert. And in today’s episode, we’re going to go over this long-time project that we’ve been working on, and we’re ready to announce, launch, and share with everybody. What is it, Natalie? What are we, what are we launching today?

Natalie MacLees: We are launching WCAG in Plain English, a collection of dozens of articles that we have translated from the official WCAG guidelines into easy-to-understand language.

Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. Yes, because if anyone has ever visited the WCAG website and WCAG articles, what is the problem?

Natalie MacLees: Oh, they’re so hard to understand. They’re very dense. They’re very technical. They also have some bad advice in them.

Funnily enough, I think because some of the techniques have been around for, you know, a decade or more, some of the advice is actually not very good. For example, telling you that you can use a title attribute on an image instead of alt text. Which we know doesn’t actually work.

So we took out the ones that we know don’t work. And you did some wonderful illustrations. Do you wanna talk about those?

Natalie Garza: Yes, so every single article was handwritten. We read through all the understanding docs. We went through every single technique page.

If you’re familiar with the WCAG articles, there’s first off a large page explaining what it is. Like who it applies to. Some examples. It links out to resources, and then it links out to techniques, which are their own separate pages showing you how to implement or how to fix that issue. And any given article, like 1.1.1 has like 30 technique pages that you would have to go visit separately, read through, see if it applies to you, and then come back, just keep going back and forth and back and forth.

So we went through the trouble of going through all of those for you and translating them into plain language. And on top of that, where it would be helpful, we did illustrations to show you, at a glance, you can see like, “Oh, that’s what the solution would be like, “Oh, like that’s what a caption is. Or like, oh, that’s what it means with contrast.” So we rewrote them. We boiled down the techniques so that you don’t have to go clicking around page to page, to page to page, with clear illustrations.

And then Natalie, do you wanna talk about the organization of our new resource?

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so we used all the different ways that WCAG itself organizes them. So you can browse by what level, whether it’s A, AA, or AAA, you can browse by