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, hey, maybe you want to add alt text to this image, right?” It should help you. It should help guide you through because we, we just can’t expect with like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who are creating content on the web. It’s not fair to expect that they’re going to be aware of all of the WCAG guidelines and know how they’re doing that. And so these tools should be guiding people through creating content in that accessible way.
Natalie Garza: Right, yeah. When I was doing research for this, I didn’t realize how many other tools also fall into this category, right? It’s anything where you’re technically the author and making content. So that’s like Canva, that could be like the Adobe Suite, what else do they have? Grammarly, Notion.
Natalie MacLees: There’s so many ways to make content on the web these days. Any social media platform, really, is letting you offer content.
Natalie Garza: do you want to talk about Reddit? We looked at Reddit earlier.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, we discovered Reddit used to let you go wild, I guess, when you were the host of a subreddit. I don’t know, creator of a subreddit, you could set all kinds of typefaces, and you could change all the colors, and that seems to have definitely gone away, or at least been way toned down, because we looked at a couple of examples on the old Reddit or classic Reddit that were definitely not accessible.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so in a sense, it is an authoring tool, Reddit.
Natalie MacLees: Sure, yeah, people go on there, they create content, yep. They post, you know, not just text, but they post pictures and videos, and sure.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, I liked your example too about Gravity Forms.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So, um, Gravity Forms recently did a lot of work to make their, to make their tool accessible. Gravity Forms is a plugin for WordPress that lets you create custom forms. And it implemented some of the ATAG guidelines, so when you’re editing a form, if you try to make a choice, like hiding the labels for your form fields, or trying to include a multi-select, it will warn you and let you know that’s not accessible, maybe you want to try a different approach to what you’re doing.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so that’s an example of an authoring tool within another authoring tool.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, that’s true.
Natalie Garza: There’s multiple levels.
Natalie MacLees: And some of that’s been built into WordPress too, because I know if you’re in the block editor and you try to put you know, a light color background with white text, you will see a warning that will let you know, “hey, maybe you should make one of these colors darker, because this isn’t going to be enough contrast.”
So it’s not that it’s not implemented at all. It’s just implemented very unevenly and not fully, unfortunately. And so that makes it harder for you know, people who are coming on the web, who have no background in coding, they don’t know HTML, they don’t know CSS, but they start a blog or they get really active posting on social media or whatever it is, and they don’t know.
And that’s not something we should expect them to know, but we should expect the tools to guide them through and help them to make better choices.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, I would like to see heading tips implemented in WordPress because you can go crazy with those headings if you really wanted to.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. And a lot of tools, I think you and I had come across this in an email tool that we were using recently that made it very easy to make text large and bold, but actually made it kind of difficult to figure out how to make it an actual heading and not just big, bold text.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, or even the other form tool we were looking at who told us to just add paragraph as a label for a field. They didn’t have the option to add an actual label.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, they didn’t even have the option to have labels for form fields. Yes, that’s terrible. Yeah,
Natalie Garza: That would be a failure on the authoring tool.
Natalie MacLees: That is definitely a failure on the authoring tool, which leads to then a WCAG failure on the front end of the site when users are coming to it. Yeah,
Natalie Garza: It trickles down, you guys. It goes wrong somewhere up above, and it comes down.
Natalie MacLees: We should demand better authoring tools.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, I was telling Natalie, I’ve been thinking about this, and since I read about A-TAG or ATAG, I feel like the authoring tools should be held more responsible.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah,
Natalie Garza: To me, it seems like you’re trying to fight the symptoms instead of fighting the actual disease here.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, and any, any improvements that we make to an authoring tool, right, then trickle out to the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people who use that platform. Right.
Natalie Garza: Mhm. Yeah. That’s just like how the social media platforms recently added alt text fields for images. I feel like that was a more recent development.
Natalie MacLees: It was definitely an afterthought, unfortunately, for most of them. Yes.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, or even Reddit, right? Just now we’re redesigning 10 years, 15 years later.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, way after the fact, way too late, way too late after way too much content is already created and is now hanging around, hanging out there, just being inaccessible.
Natalie Garza: All right, do you want to talk about the next cousin?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, what are you calling it?
Natalie Garza: Let’s go into UAAG (ooh-aug)
Natalie MacLees: UAAG!
User Agent. So there’s two A’s: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, UAAG. And I don’t know, for all I know, people do call it UAAG (ooh-aug). I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. So that’s how tragic things are. And so this is, you know, browsers mostly but also media players and ensuring that those are accessible, that they are integrated fully with the accessibility API, that if I’m using any particular browser, it’s going to work with my screen reader, or it’s going to work with my screen magnifier, or, you know, whatever assistive technology I happen to be using. So these obviously have a pretty huge impact on users because, you know, when we look at the number of products that are impacted by WCAG, it’s billions of them, right? And things impacted by ATAG, it would probably be in the millions by now, if we look at all of the social media platforms and all of the web authoring tools and all of the other ways that you can put content online, there’s probably millions of them.
And then when we get to User agents, there’s less than a hundred probably that are in common use. I mean, there’s probably way more than that, but like if you ask somebody what browser they use, there’s like a 99 percent chance it’s one of like five, right? It’s not going to be some wild extra choice. So it’s a very small number. And so the impact here of implementing accessibility correctly is even bigger because we’re going to have millions and millions of users of every single one of these tools.
Natalie Garza: Do you think “user agent” also applies to operating systems? Or is that a different set of guidelines, maybe, I didn’t find?
(Post-editing note: No, UAAG does not apply to operating systems. Each operating system has developed its own set of accessibility guidelines that they follow.)
Natalie MacLees: I don’t actually know if there is explicitly a set of guidelines that apply to operating systems. That’s a good, that’s a good question that we could look into.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, cuz, like I said, I just got a new iPhone update, and they introduced a bunch of accessibility features, and they’re honestly pretty similar to, like, what Chrome would.
Natalie MacLees: Sure.
Natalie Garza: Also in my research, it seems like UAAG is actually more commonly implemented than you would think, right? Like, Chrome, Firefox, Safari.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah, they do. The user agents do tend to do a pretty good job. They aren’t super even, which is why we end up with situations where if you want to use VoiceOver as your screen reader, for example, pretty much you have to use Safari because that’s where it’s going to work best. If you want to use JAWS, you have to use Edge as your browser.
And if you want to use NVDA, you’re kind of stuck with Firefox, and it’s not that those screen readers won’t work with other browsers. It’s just that they work so much better with the one that they are kind of paired up with. And there’s no, like, as far as I’m aware, there’s no, like, official relationship, I mean obviously except VoiceOver and Safari, but like for NVDA and Firefox, and JAWS and Edge, like there’s no official relationship between those, it’s just kind of where the developers of those tools have focused their time.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, cause you can’t, you can’t fix every browser as a screen reader, right?
Natalie MacLees: Right, yeah, every browser’s got its little quirks and its little shortcomings, and then the screen readers have to figure out how they’re going to deal with that, yeah.
Natalie Garza: I guess they each just decided to capture their own little share of the market in browsers.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. I mean, they, they have limited time and resources, so they’re going to focus in, you know, if you can make one thing really well, then that’s better than to try to do five things not very well. And especially when you’re talking about something like a screen reader, the people who are using a screen reader are very dependent on that. And so it’s very important that it works really well. And so you definitely would want to focus on, well, let’s just do this one thing and do it really well, especially because the user agents are all free. You don’t pay for Chrome or Firefox or Arc browser or Safari or Edge, right? Like they’re all free.
You just go online and you download them. So there’s not really a bit, you know, there’s not a cost barrier there. You can use whichever one you want.
Natalie Garza: Let’s, let’s talk about the next cousin. PDF/UA (p-duff-oo-ah).
Natalie MacLees: My favorite name.
Natalie Garza: Mmhmm. After this video, we’re going to share a PDF (p-duff) with everybody.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. We’re going to share a downloadable PDF (p-duff). Oh, a PDF, PDF UA, which this one gets an extra U in there and no G.
So PDF. Oh, do you know what PDF stands for?
Natalie Garza: Printable, printable, no?
Natalie MacLees: No.
Natalie Garza: Are you sure? Portable? I thought it meant something like printable ready.
Natalie MacLees: No. Portable Document Format is PDF.
Natalie Garza: Interesting. I don’t believe that. I’m going to see if there’s another acronym. (Searches online to double-check PDF acronym in disbelief)
Natalie MacLees: All right. So I can’t talk over your clacky keyboard.
Natalie Garza: Sorry, sorry. Yes, you’re right. It does mean Portable Document Format. What the heck?
Natalie MacLees: I, my secret hidden talent is I’m really, really good at internet acronyms.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, you kind of have to be if you’re going to be in accessibility.
Natalie MacLees: I know what they all stand for.
Natalie Garza: Okay, PDFs. Continue.
Natalie MacLees: Portable Document Format, Universal Accessibility. So WCAG applies to PDFs, as you discovered when you were looking into this topic for the podcast. But then there’s some extra PDF-specific things that you have to do to make sure that PDFs are accessible. There’s document tagging and reading order and things like that, that you can modify in Acrobat and other PDF editing tools to ensure that your PDFs are accessible.
But to be honest with you, if you have some content and you really want it to be accessible, make it HTML. PDFs are, are pretty problematic most of the time, from an accessibility standpoint.
Natalie Garza: What, I guess, what reasons would you need a PDF then? Just like if you want to share like a flyer. Yeah, printable flyer.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, people like them to have something that’s printable, right? Like, oh, download my printable planner for whatever. So they like to have it for that. And then of course, at least in the US, I think this might be true in other countries as well, the government just loves a PDF. They just, any government website has, I don’t know, a library of tens of thousands of PDFs.
Everything’s a PDF instead of just being like a blog post. I don’t know why. There must be something about their, like, internal approval process or something that goes more smoothly when things are a PDF.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, right now, it’s tax season. There are so many ridiculous, stupid PDFs from the government. Don’t get me started.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it does make for, like, one advantage of a PDF over a webpage. If it is something that you are going to try to print, you can get a more consistently nice-looking, nicely laid-out result from a PDF instead of a webpage. That is, you know, that is something that we can’t overlook. It does have that advantage to it. But it is really tough to make a PDF truly accessible, and it’s a whole, in fact, document accessibility is a separate specialty branch of accessibility professionals. Document accessibility specialists, that’s all they do, is work on things like PDFs, Word files, Excel files, PowerPoint files, things like that, and make them accessible.
It is. I can’t do that. I’ve tried. It’s terrible. You need like a PhD in, in PDFs.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because there’s some pretty fancy PDFs out there where, like, you can tap through the field, fill them out, check boxes, signatures.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, they get pretty fancy, and it’s really rough. It’s really hard. The tools are not great.
Natalie Garza: But see, like, we’re website people, right?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Natalie Garza: If you want a from, just put a form on your site, I don’t get why we need a PDF for it. That’s what I think, that’s what I have to say about that.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Just putting the form online is so much easier. There’s so many lovely, fully accessible online form solutions.
Natalie Garza: Thank you. Yes. PDF/UA, you’re like the third cousin removed. That’s why you don’t have a G in your name, you have a different you came from the other side of the family.
Natalie MacLees: PDF/UA is from the wrong side of the tracks.
Natalie Garza: You’re from the dad’s side.
Any last remarks about PDF/UA, Natalie? Or UAAG, or ATAG?
Natalie MacLees: No, I will say I was talking, I was speaking at a conference one time, and I was talking to an audience of people who were building an authoring tool. And I started talking about WCAG and everybody was like, yeah, yeah, we’ve heard all this before. And I was like, okay, well, what about ATAG? Who’s heard of ATAG? A room with maybe like 300 people in it. Not one person raised their hand. Not one person had heard of ATAG, and they were all building an authoring tool.
Natalie Garza: Wow. Is it okay, I have some questions, actually.
Natalie MacLees: Okay.
Natalie Garza: I guess I didn’t research this as deep as I should have. Does ATAG and UAAG have success criterion? Just like WCAG and techniques that link to them.
Natalie MacLees: I don’t actually know.
Natalie Garza: Okay. I wonder if it’s like the same thing, like a little directory of success criteria they link up to techniques and failures.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, we can definitely put links to them in the show notes and people can go explore them for themselves.
(Post-editing notes: They’re similar but follow different structures:
- ATAG is structured with principles, guidelines, and success criteria, similar to WCAG, but it’s focused on authoring tools.
- PDF/UA follows a standard approach rather than WCAG-style guidelines. It has requirements for accessible PDFs but not structured success criteria.
- UAAG has guidelines and checkpoints rather than formal success criteria.)
Natalie Garza: Yeah.
Natalie MacLees: But now that you know that these exist, if you’re using an authoring tool that’s not helping you make accessible content, you should file a support ticket.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. Cause I feel like it should, we should hold authoring tools more responsible. I feel like we crack down a lot on web content, but like a lot of people just don’t really know. Like there’s millions and billions of people out there like making WordPress sites. Mm
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. And it’s, it’s a lot, it’s a lot to put on them to say you have to know how to do all these things to have a website. It’s pretty, that’s a pretty difficult thing to demand of people who are not technical. And a lot of WCAG is pretty technical, right? And if you don’t, if you’re not technical and you don’t know code, it’s not very fair to expect that you’re going to be able to produce accessible content.
But if your authoring tool helps you do it. There’s no reason why you couldn’t.
Natalie Garza: Mmhmm. Yeah, it’s just like a form building tool, right? Like, if you let people make inaccessible fields I mean, that’s not the person’s fault. They just bought your form plugin. I don’t know.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. They’re just using the settings that you made available in your tool, right? But your tool could limit people’s choices. And I do think that that plays into it a little bit is that these tools are a little bit afraid that they’re going to lose users or that users are going to get upset or frustrated that they can’t, you know, that they can’t make a pale yellow background with a white text on it, right? They’re going to be mad. Well, I want to do this. Why aren’t you letting me do this? And I think they’re, they’re a little bit afraid that they’re going to get some blowback from their users. Who say, no, I want to be able to say I should be able to make inaccessible content if I want to.
Natalie Garza: I mean, I want to go 90 on a 60-mile-per-hour road. I don’t know what to tell you!
Don’t put yellow text on a white background!
I want to go to the store and just take what I want! I want to go get a new flat screen and walk out with it! That’s too dang bad! You can’t put yellow on white! I don’t know what to tell you!
I don’t know. That’s, that’s, that’s my opinion.
Natalie MacLees: Well, I, I agree with you. I agree with you. I think if ATAG were more robustly implemented across all the different authoring tools that are out there, we would see a lot of improvement in general web content accessibility across the web. Yeah.
Natalie Garza: It trickles down. File support tickets.
Natalie MacLees: File support tickets. I’ve always been a fan of filing support tickets for inaccessible things.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. I guess what would you do if they respond and they’re like, “Sorry, it’s not a, it’s not a priority for us.”
Natalie MacLees: Well, if I had the option, I would probably look for another tool that would take it more seriously. That’s not always an option. So you can always write back to them and say, can you please escalate my, you know, my request? Because here’s the, the reasons that it’s important. necessarily going to get anywhere, but if you don’t do it, not going to get anywhere at all, ever, right?
Natalie Garza: Yeah.
Natalie MacLees: And I think if we all started being more proactive about demanding accessibility from the tools that we use, the companies implementing those tools would have to start accommodating all of us.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because I feel like the, the bigger companies, they have, they have the budget.
Natalie MacLees: Sure.
Natalie Garza: Like, I feel like cracking down on the small business who just has like a little WordPress site, doesn’t really know any better, you can crack down on the bigger company. Why’d you let them, why’d you let them put light yellow on a white background
Natalie MacLees: Without even so much as warning them, right? Or why do you let them put a hundred images up without telling them they should add alt text to it? Because how else were they going to know? How else were they going to find out that that was something they should be doing?
Natalie Garza: I think little warnings at least to help people understand, is one step. One step.
Natalie MacLees: It’s a step in the right direction.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so step in the right direction, but enforcing it?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I mean, I think it is mostly up to the marketplace to enforce something like that and to just say, listen, if your tool’s not, it doesn’t help my users, you know, I want to, I’ve this big company with a hundred people writing blog posts, and I want them to all make sure they’re accessible. And if your tool doesn’t help them do that, I’m not going to use it.
Natalie Garza: I guess it’s kind of a case of you pay with your dollars. Oh, you vote with your dollars. You don’t put
your eggs in one basket.
Natalie MacLees: Are we just saying, are we just saying sayings now?
Natalie Garza: How the turntables…
Okay, we’re getting too carried away. We need to end the podcast.
Natalie MacLees: All right.
Natalie Garza: Why, why does WCAG get all the attention, Natalie? Do you want to go over that really quick and then we can wrap up?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. I mean, I think generally, the number of websites and web apps that WCAG applies to is, you know, maybe billions, right? But at least hundreds of millions. And so it’s just a much bigger area. And when we look at authoring tools, that’s a much smaller subset, right? There’s probably like one authoring tool for every several thousand or, you know, Websites. then when you get to user agent, that’s even smaller, right? There’s even a tiny number of user agents that everyone in the world is using, just these handful of different user agents. So I think that’s mainly what it is is that it’s just the number of things that it applies to is the difference between, you know, billions versus maybe tens of thousands versus literally like 10 user agents.
Natalie Garza: I think the ATAG is like the middle child, right? Forgotten.
Natalie MacLees: It is the middle child, the forgotten middle child.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. Like, UAAG, they have a few browsers. All eyes are on them. They’re the first child.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Natalie Garza: The last child? WCAG.
Natalie MacLees: That’s the baby of the family.
Natalie Garza: Yeah.
Natalie MacLees: What’s, what’s PDF/UA?
Natalie Garza: PDF/UA is the uncle.
Natalie MacLees:The uncle who lives in his van.
Natalie Garza: Smells questionable.
Natalie MacLees: The uncle from Napoleon Dynamite.
Natalie Garza: “I bet I could throw a football over those mountains right there.”
“If coach would’ve put me in fourth quarter.”
Yeah, that’s PDF/UA.
Natalie MacLees: All right.
Natalie Garza: We’re getting carried away again! The drama, the drama with these cousins, it’s too much.
Natalie MacLees: All this family drama.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, the family drama, we’re getting too carried away. Okay, let’s wrap up the podcast.
Natalie MacLees: All right. I think we have to say something to wrap up
Natalie Garza: Yes. Okay, so with all that said, you guys, those are WCAG’s cousins. Much less known, but now you know they exist, so reach out to your authoring tools, if you spot any accessibility issues or any, anything that could help you make your content more accessible, send the messages, move them, make, shake them, and then
Natalie MacLees: Vote with your dollars.
Natalie Garza: vote with your dollars.
Let the turntables . We met UAAG, the other cousin for user agents of browsers. Maybe? Operating systems, not confirmed. And then we met PDF/UA, the weird uncle, who is used in conjunction with WCAG. But there’s extra accessibility guidelines, just for PDFs.
Natalie MacLees: You might need to say that again.
Natalie Garza: Um Was it? Oh yeah. And we met PDF/UA, the weird uncle, who is used in conjunction with WCAG, but there’s also additional guidelines just for PDFs. They’re very finicky. So with that said, thank you for joining us for the 12th AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. Natalie, do you have any last words? Where could we learn more about WCAG?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, if you want to test out your homepage for free, you can come to AAArdvarkaccessibility.com. Find out all the WCAG success criteria that you might have failures on your homepage.
And AAArdvark now has a PDF remediation available as a service. So if that’s something you’re interested in, get in touch.
Natalie Garza: Yes. $10 a page.
Natalie MacLees: $10 a page.
Natalie Garza: So with all that said, thank you guys for joining us!
