The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the final draft of its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1.0, as a W3C Recommendation on May 5, 1999.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is part of a series of accessibility guidelines published by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. The series also includes the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, formerly entitled "WAI Page Author Guidelines", explain to web content developers (a.k.a. web page authors) how to make their pages more accessible to people with disabilities. Following these guidelines will also make pages more useful to people using a broad range of devices, such as desktop browsers, voice browsers, mobile phones, automobile-based PC's, etc., and to search engines. Tools that create Web content (such as HTML editors, document conversion tools, tools that generate Web content from databases, etc.) should generate content that is consistent with these guidelines.
The Guidelines have been organized as follows:
The Guidelines document includes a conformance statement that explains how documents or processes may claim conformance to the Guidelines.
The Guidelines are accompanied by another document, entitled "Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines." The Techniques document explains in detail how authors may implement the checkpoints enumerated in the Guidelines. (Please note that the Techniques document, which continues to evolve, is still a "working draft" and not yet a proposed recommendation. Therefore, comments about the techniques are welcome, and should be sent to <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>.)
The Guidelines have been produced by the W3C's Page Author Guidelines Working Group as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative.
On May 5, 1999, version 1.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAGL) was released as a W3C Recommendation. The designation "W3C Recommendation" signifies that the document has been subjected to a public review (which ended on March 19, 1999) and that it has been circulated amongst W3C member organizations for review. Translated into plain English, this means is that the WCAGL carry the same weight and authority as the HTML 4.0 or Cascading Style Sheet mark-up languages, as well as all the other Technical Reports generated by the W3C.
What follows is a list of supplemental resources, which you can use to learn more about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the W3C, the WAI, and web accessibility in general.
This page was originally created on February 29, 1999
Converted to HTML4 & CSS2 on March 10, 1999
Contents of this document last modified May 6, 1999