Join Natalie and Natalie in the 13th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they demystify the myriad of acronyms, numeronyms, and keywords you encounter in accessibility. Topics include WCAG, ARIA, live regions, and the importance of semantic HTML. The episode also touches on assistive technologies and accessibility laws like Section 508. Add to your accessibility knowledge with a speed round of common numeronyms and crucial keywords that lay the foundation for accessible web design.
Natalie G: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is our 13th episode, and here with us today is,
Natalie M: Natalie MacLees.
Natalie G: And she’s an accessibility expert, and I am Natalie G, the other Natalie, an accessibility novice. And in our 13th installment, we are going to talk about acronyms, numeronyms, and keywords in accessibility. Cause if there’s anything you’ll notice once you start learning is that there’s a lot of acronyms and a lot of keywords and a lot of things from like coding backgrounds and you may not understand all of them, but we’re going to cover them all today.
Natalie M: All!? That’s ambitious.
Natalie G: A lot of them
Natalie M: I bet we forget something.
Natalie G: Yeah. If we
Natalie M: forget anything,
There’s just so many.
Natalie G: leave a comment in the description below. What? Leave a comment in the comments below. Alright, so do you want to start with the one overwhelming, most commonly used, everywhere you see the accessibility, this is mentioned too, acronym.
Natalie M: Yeah, WCAG or WCAG or WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So a set of around 80, I think, total success criteria that basically lay out how to build an accessible website or web application.
Natalie G: It covers a lot of different tests, different standards, different rules you should follow for web content.
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: And it’s everywhere because…
Natalie M: It applies to all websites.
Natalie G: Yeah. Applies to all websites and it’s the most commonly enforced across laws.
Natalie M: Yes, most of the accessibility laws around the world are either directly say to implement WCAG or indirectly have a set of rules based on WCAG.
Natalie G: Yeah. And there’s different versions of WCAG too.
Natalie M: There are 1.0, which is very old, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and they’re working on 3. Yes.
Natalie G: And, there’s different levels of WCAG.
Natalie M: Yes, A, AA, AAA. A being the easiest one to achieve, but also the least accommodating, and then AAA being the most accommodating and the most difficult to achieve. Most of the time, people are going to try to comply with AA, so just that sweet spot right in the middle, and most of the laws refer to WCAG AA.
Natalie G: And funny enough, the A’s are not actually acronyms.
Natalie M: No, they’re not. They’re just letter grades.
Natalie G: A, 2A, and 3A.
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: And they’re not acronyms in AAArdvark either, in the name AAArdvark.
Natalie M: No, they’re not.
Natalie G: It’s just a play on words.
Natalie M: Exactly.
Natalie G: Alright, next acronym. What makes up WCAG in terms of principles?
Natalie M: Yeah. So we talked about WCAG before and how it’s divided into different levels. The very top level, like the highest level of divisions, is the principles, and there are four of them, and they spell out the acronym POUR, P O U R, for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Natalie G: As just helpful to remember the different principles, right?
Natalie M: Yes. Yes.
Natalie G: I did have a misconception before. I thought each principle was connected to like a type of disability. That’s not true.
Natalie M: Oh, no, that’s not true. Perceivable, for example, just means that everyone who comes to your website can perceive the information with whatever senses they have available. So that could be somebody who is blind, can perceive your website by hearing it or with touch with a braille keyboard. It could be someone who’s deaf can perceive any spoken or sound content by reading a transcript or captions or by looking at sign language interpretation, et cetera. So they’re not specific to one certain audience or anything like that.
Natalie G: Next set of acronyms.
Natalie M: The ones we talked about last time.
Natalie G: Yes. The
Natalie M: WCAG cousins, A-TAG or ATAG or A T A G, the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, UAAG is our best guess, or U A A G, the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, and then, what we said was PDF/UA or PDF slash UA, which is PDF Portable Document Format Universal Accessibility.
Natalie G: That’s an acronym combo.
Natalie M: Yes, yes. Two acronyms in one.
Natalie G: Yeah. And ATAG, a quick overview, is for authoring tools, which just means anything that lets you create content.
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: They have their own set of guidelines. And I did look it up, they do have their own little success criterion.
Natalie M: Nice. It’s not as extensive,
Natalie G: but it does.
Natalie M: Nice.
Natalie G: And then UAAG, user agent. That’s for any browsers, media players. I read that it’s anything that renders web content.
Natalie M: Okay. Mostly, that’s browsers. There’s a few other things you might use, but mostly that would be browsers.
Natalie G: Yeah. It made me think of Kindles or e-readers.
Natalie M: Sure, but that just has a browser built into it.
Natalie G: Does it?
Natalie M: I worked at an e-reader company.
It had, It had a separate browser built into the firmware, yeah.
Natalie G: Interesting. You did work at an e-reader company.
Natalie M: I worked a lot with that browser. I know all about it.
Natalie G: Was it accessible? No. Oh no.
Natalie M: No, it was a terrible browser.
Natalie G: Oof. All right, well, we should contact them and introduce them to UAAG.
Natalie M: Yes, they’ve gone out of business, so
Natalie G: Oh, no,
Natalie M: that’s what you get for not being accessible.
Natalie G: Yes, and UAAG also, after the last episode, does not apply to operating systems.
Natalie M: Okay, that’s good that you looked that up.
Natalie G: Operating systems, they each have their own set of guidelines that they made up themselves,
Natalie M: Interesting. Okay.
Natalie G: Anyway, and then PDF/UA, PDFs, in addition to using WCAG, because a lot of the same principles apply, they also have to use PDF/UA, Universal Accessibility Guidelines.
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: And if you want to learn more about these cousins, watch our last episode! We’ll move on, we’ll move on. Alright,
Natalie M: All right.
Natalie G: Big acronym you see a lot in accessibility. Do you want to talk about VPAT?
Natalie M: VPAT that gets used incorrectly more than probably any other one.
Natalie G: Mhm, mhm,
Natalie M: So we have two acronyms that go together, which is VPAT and ACR. VPAT is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. And ACR is Accessibility Compliance Report. You use a VPAT to create an ACR. But everyone just calls the final report a VPAT, which is not,
Natalie G: mhm.
Natalie M: it’s not, the VPAT is the template you use to create the report and the report is called an ACR.
Natalie G: Yes, the long lost forgotten other uncle, ACR.
Natalie M: Yeah. It is really weird that they have such two different names, but I don’t know. I don’t know who named them.
Natalie G: Yeah, maybe like, it should have been like VPAT and CPAT.
Natalie M: or just like Accessibility Compliance Report and Accessibility Compliance Report Template. Ha ha ha.
Natalie G: Ah, yeah, that’s true.
Natalie M: Oh well, what are you gonna do?
Natalie G: Yeah, well that’s VPAT and ACR. Next, W3C, WAI,
Natalie M: Yeah, W3C, the overlords of the internet. So the World Wide Web Consortium, so they say W3 instead of WWW or dub dub dub. And yeah, that’s the organization that develops all of the standards that we all use for the web, like not just the accessibility guidelines, but also HTML, CSS. And then I think they have finally given up the ghost on ECMAScript and just given into calling it JavaScript.
And some other, some other web standards as well. But yeah, that’s the body that does that.
Natalie G: and
Natalie M: oh, within them is the WAI, the Web Accessibility Initiative, which is one of the working groups that works on the WCAG guidelines.
Natalie G: So the overarching organization W3C.
Natalie M: Yes, and there are working groups within it that focus on all the different standards. And WAI is just one of those groups.
Natalie G: And they are specializing in accessibility
Natalie M: Yes, that’s what they do 24/7.
Natalie G: And they’re the ones building WCAG 3.0.
Natalie M: Yes, they are in public. You can go keep an eye on what they’re doing.
Natalie G: Yeah. Isn’t there like a draft page or like
Natalie M: Oh yeah.
Natalie G: they have so far?
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: very, very different.
Natalie M: Yes. They’re completely rethinking WCAG, which is good. I think it needs that.
Natalie G: I think it needs that, too. Because each level, or I guess each version of WCAG, just builds on top of the previous one.
Natalie M: So far, so far, that’s how it’s worked. And so with three, they’re going to start fresh.
Natalie G: Okay. Next acronym. ARIA.
Natalie M: ARIA, a girl’s name, but also Accessible Rich Internet Applications. And ARIA is basically a set of attributes, but it’s confusing because they don’t work on their own most of the time and need JavaScript to go along with them. But it’s a way that you can make custom components accessible so that they can communicate their value and their state and what type of control they are to assistive technology.
So if you need to build like a custom checkbox or a custom select dropdown or something like that, you would need to look into ARIA and figure out what all the different attributes you need to use and how those need to interact with your JavaScript to make sure that somebody who’s using assistive technology can still use your fancy custom components.
Natalie G: Yeah. And ARIA is, it’s like a fallback solution.
Natalie M: Yes. Yes. The first rule of ARIA is don’t use ARIA. You
should try everything you can to not have to use it.
Natalie G: Yeah, the first letter in ARIA means “avoid”. I’m just kidding. And if you are looking at the guidelines, you will see ARIA referenced a lot.
Natalie M: Yes, there’s lots of like sufficient techniques and recommended techniques for the different success criteria that refer to different ARIA attributes and rules and components and things like that.
Natalie G: And if you’re still not sure what that means, then contact your local developer to learn more.
Natalie M: You’re a friendly local front-end developer.
Natalie G: I think that’s a really highly technical term, but you will see it a lot. So I wanted to include it.
Natalie M: Yeah, ARIA is very technical, yeah.
Natalie G: Next, we have AT.
Natalie M: Assistive Technology!
Natalie G: Is that one common? I haven’t seen it that much.
Natalie M: Yeah, it gets used quite a lot in accessibility, like, communities and things like that. Yeah, because “assistive technology” takes a long time to say.
Natalie G: Yeah, and it is, if you have to type it ten times.
Natalie M: Uh huh. Yeah.
Natalie G: Okay, I think we can do like a speed thing now. I think we went through the most important ones.
Natalie M: Okay.
Speed round.
Natalie G: What’s ICT?
Natalie M: Information and Communication Technology. I think it might be a term invented by Section 508.
And it just refers to, this is what Section 508 refers to. Yeah, I’m not positive about that, but that’s the first time I heard that term was in connection with Section 508.
Natalie G: I see. I can see how it’s probably used with laws
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: Speaking of 508, do you want to talk about 508?
Natalie M: Yeah, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1978?
Natalie G: Three?
Natalie M: 3? Yeah, sometime in the 70s. Yeah, it’s just the 508th section of that law and requires Government agencies to have accessible websites and for any organizations or institutions that get government funding to have accessible websites, but also all of their information and communication technology has to be accessible.
So if they use kiosks, like to check in for your appointment or phone systems, like all of those things have to be accessible.
Natalie G: All their ICT.
Natalie M: Yes. All are ICT.
Natalie G: I guess I’m, I think there’s some confusion there. 508 is not really an acronym.
Natalie M: No.
Natalie G: But it’s shorthand for Section 508.
Natalie M: Sure.
Natalie G: All right, next. CAPTCHA.
Natalie M: Oh, this one is my favorite. Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Natalie G: I didn’t know this was an acronym before I read into this.
Natalie M: It’s a stretch, because as you see, there’s way too many words.
It should have a few more letters in it, but that’s okay.
Natalie G: Yeah, there’s “test”, “to tell”, “and”. They missed a few.
Natalie M: Yeah. Yeah. And Turing is named after Alan Turing, the computer scientist. And yeah, a Turing test is just a test to distinguish between a machine and a human.
Natalie G: Yeah, and CAPTCHA comes up a lot in accessibility because CAPTCHAs are typically not accessible.
Natalie M: Notoriously inaccessible. Yes. I mean, even somebody without disabilities hates CAPTCHAs. We just don’t wanna deal with them. . Yeah.
Natalie G: From my current guideline research, it’s because the tests can be inaccessible. If
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: it’s a visual test, it also has to be auditory too, or have the option to change.
Natalie M: Yeah. There is a weird carve out in WCAG for CAPTCHA to let people still use it, even though it’s inaccessible. There are newer versions of CAPTCHA that are much easier, that are just check a box, or sometimes they’re completely invisible and you don’t have to interact with them at all. And that’s a good direction to move in because those are obviously gonna be way more accessible than click all the images of a bus.
Or slide this slider over to the right, or do this math question, or decipher this text that’s impossible for anyone to read.
So they are moving in a good direction, but they do still have accessibility issues.
Natalie G: Yeah, I just realized there’s also the cognitive tests.
Natalie M: Yeah, what’s three plus seven? Then you have to answer, yeah.
Natalie G: Just another, another layer to the CAPTCHA chaos
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: All right, next! Acronym, ADA.
Natalie M: The Americans with Disabilities Act just requires that any businesses open to the public and government agencies have to be accessible. So this is the law that gives us, you know, handlebars in restrooms and ramps into buildings. And also according to some recent Department of Justice rulings, accessible websites.
Natalie G: It’s not fully, fully enforced though.
Natalie M: There’s definitely some issues with it. And then the only way for it to be enforced is with lawsuits, which are of course expensive and time consuming and exclusionary because not everyone can afford to file a lawsuit. Yeah, there’s lots of problems with it.
Natalie G: And that wraps up the acronyms.
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: Now we move on to the numer-numeronyms.
Natalie M: All right. I think we can do these in a speed round.
Natalie G: Yeah, these can be more speedy.
Natalie M: All right.
Natalie G: A11y. Accessibility,
Natalie M: Because there are 11 letters between the A and the Y, you put and write the A, and then you replace all the other letters with the number 11, and then you write the Y. That is how numeronyms work.
Natalie G: And there’s a really popular one for the literal word, accessibility. A11y.
Natalie M: Which looks a little bit like the word “ally”. Because a one looks like a lowercase l, kind of. So sometimes people will pronounce it ally, or ally, even.
Natalie G: If I see it, I just say accessibility.
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: Do you want to go through the rest of the numeronyms?
Natalie M: Sure! I18N. Internationalization. L10N, localization, T9N, translation. So those are all closely related concepts, subtly different from one another, but they all deal with putting text in many different languages and date formats and things like that to use the formats that are used in different countries in different areas of the world.
So those are all really common. And then we have C14N, canonicalization. Which is just having canonical URLs for your data and things like that. That’s a whole other thing. I don’t think we’ll dig into too much here. And then Natalie, the one that you coined is…
Natalie G: T13G.
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: Because, in our own company, we are constantly saying “troubleshooting”, and I got tired of writing it out, and so I coined T13G. I mean, if translation gets one, troubleshooting can get one too.
Natalie M: All right, has it caught on?
Natalie G: Some of my team members have told me they’re confused about what I’m saying, but they will learn eventually.
Natalie M: Did anybody say quit trying to make fetch happen?
Natalie G: They’re like, “You don’t even go here!” It’s gonna, watch, after this episode goes out, it’s gonna be like a shockwave went through the internet. Everyone’s gonna start saying T13G.
Natalie M: Okay, all right, I look forward to it.
Natalie G: Yes, me too. Okay. Keywords to help wrap up this podcast before we go into the 40 minute mark like last time. Keyword you will see a lot in accessibility. Alt text.
Natalie M: Yes,
That is just a text replacement for images, so anybody who can’t see your images, they’re going to get this text instead.
Natalie G: Contrast Ratio.
Natalie M: The color difference between text and the background color it’s sitting on. So black text on a white background has a really high contrast ratio. And say pale gray text on a white background has a very low contrast ratio. And there is a specific numerical formula for figuring that out.
There’s tools you can use that will do it for you, don’t worry. You just put in your foreground and background color and there is a minimum threshold in the WCAG guidelines for what that color contrast should be.
(Post-editing notes: Check out WebAIMs contrast checker tool.)
Natalie G: Favoring higher contrast.
Natalie M: Yes, to make it nice and bright and clear for everyone to perceive.
Natalie G: Keyboard navigation.
Natalie M: Yeah, so we have lots and lots of users who can’t use a mouse in the traditional sense who rely on a keyboard or some kind of keyboard replacement. So you should always be able to navigate any web page or web app with just the keyboard without using your mouse. You should be able to get to everything, work all the different controls, fill in all the information.
Natalie G: Focus order.
Natalie M: That’s related to keyboard navigation. And that’s when you when you’re navigating through a website or a web application with a keyboard to move from one thing to the next, you hit the tab key and it will move focus to each different little element. And typically you’ll see some kind of indicator, like usually it’s some kind of highlight ring around The item that has focus, so that you know where you are on the page and focus order is just the order that that happens as you go through the page.
Natalie G: And focus order has to have a rhyme and reason. You can’t just be
Natalie M: Yes.
Natalie G: to the bottom to the middle
Natalie M: Jump in and yeah, if you have a, if you have a form with eight fields in it, it should go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, not jumping around unpredictably in the form. Yeah.
Natalie G: Alright, next. Skip links.
Natalie M: Oh, another one related to keyboard navigation. So, these are little links that help you skip to certain parts of the content. So, most commonly, there is one on a page, and it’s right at the very top. It’s the very first thing that you’re going to encounter using a keyboard. You might be thinking, but I’ve never seen one of these.
Most of the time they are hidden until you actually tab, hit the tab key. So you can start trying that on websites and you’ll see a little tag pop up usually at the top left corner. And it will say skip to main content. And when you press the enter key, it will just skip over that whole header, the sidebar, skip all that stuff, and just take you to the main article or the main content of the page.
Natalie G: Sometimes they can be different, right? They can be like, “skip to contact”.
Natalie M: Sometimes there’s skip to nav, skip. Yeah, they can skip to all kinds of things, skip to the help button. Skip. Yeah, you can skip to anything.
Natalie G: Whatever’s important on your page.
Natalie M: Exactly.
Natalie G: Next. Semantic HTML.
Natalie M: Oh you missed an acronym opportunity here with POSH. Plain Old Semantic HTML.
Natalie G: Oh, Jesus.,
Natalie M: So Posh is making a little bit of a comeback right now. This it was a term that was popular maybe about 20 years ago among web developers, and it’s making a comeback now because a lot of developers using front end frameworks like React and Vue have forgotten about the importance of semantic HTML.
So it’s just using your HTML tags the way they were meant to be used. They actually have a meaning to them. Right? An H1 tag doesn’t just make text big and bold, it actually has a meaning that this is a heading that’s telling you what the content afterward means, so. That’s semantic HTML, is using all those tags correctly according to their meaning.
Natalie G: Next. Live regions.
Natalie M: That’s an ARIA concept for announcing changes on a page to screen reader users. So if you have a dynamic page, kind of change where maybe you type a few letters into a search bar and the search results automatically update. If you’re using assistive technology, there’s no way that you know that that just happened.
And that’s not a typical thing that happens on websites. So that’s a case where you would use a live region that would then announce, “Oh, search results were updated.” So that, The person who’s using the site knows, “Hey, something just happened, something just changed.”
Natalie G: Yeah. And then you also see regions in the guidelines too. So it doesn’t have to be dynamic, the regions,
Natalie M: Regions don’t have to be dynamic. No.
Natalie G: But live regions are.
Natalie M: Live regions are, yeah.
Natalie G: Alright, form labels,
Natalie M: All of your form fields have to have a label that is visible at all times. You can’t just use a placeholder and you can’t just have a form field with no indication of what it’s for or why it’s on the page.
Natalie G: And if you click on the label,
Natalie M: It will focus the form field and or check the checkbox or check the radio button.
Natalie G: Next, error identification.
Natalie M: Yeah, that’s just helping people out, if they filled out your form and they do something wrong, you have to explain to them what went wrong so that they know how to fix it. Because I know I’ve had this experience and I assume most other people who use the internet have where you fill out a form and you click submit and it says error.
It was like, but what’s wrong? I don’t know what to fix. I don’t know where the problem is. And it’s very frustrating. So error identification is you’re telling somebody which field has a problem and some instructions on how they can fix it, right? Like maybe their formatting of their phone number is wrong or their email address is invalid or they skipped a field and left something blank that was required, but you need to say which field it was and how you fix it.
Natalie G: Last one, very similar to the first one we covered. Text alternative.
Natalie M: Yeah. So, um, I think when we talked about alt text, we only touched on images, but of course there’s other kinds of non-text content besides just images. There’s videos, there’s audio, there’s animated animations, there’s infographics, charts, graphs, all kinds of different things that are not text, that communicate information.
And no matter what kind of those you’re using, you have to have some kind of text alternative for people who can’t perceive. Whatever the content you’re presenting is.
Natalie G: So you have alternative text, which is an attribute, and then you have text alternatives, which is like captions, transcripts.
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: Also counts as alt text.
Natalie M: Yeah. It’s a text alternative for something. Yeah. Or like a long description of what’s happening in a chart or a graph or a big description of all the information presented in an infographic. Like all of that would be text alternatives.
Natalie G: Yes. That is the end of our list, you guys. We made it through the acronyms, numeronyms, keywords, and learned a few other things along the way.
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: POSH and
Natalie M: POSH!
Natalie G: T13G
Natalie M: Yeah.
Natalie G: So with that, Natalie, where can we go to learn more about accessibility?
Natalie M: Oh, you can check out aaardvarkaccessibility.com, scan your homepage for free, no credit card required, and learn all about the accessibility issues on your page and how you can fix them.
Natalie G: And so with that, that wraps up episode 13 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is Natalie G, and with me is Natalie M, and thank you for watching!
(Post-editing notes: We forgot all the accessibility certification acronyms! Check them out in our Types of Accessibility Certification podcast.)
