WCAG

Logins are critical to the digital world. We need them to keep the bad guys out of our stuff. This includes everything from our email, bank, social media, and e-commerce accounts. And that necessarily creates barriers, which can sometimes present accessibility issues. UX, engineering, and security professionals designing login systems have the difficult task of balancing ease of use with safeguards to keep bad actors out. Following accessibility principles and best practices, including new success criteria for accessible authentication in the brand new WCAG 2.2 release, can ensure that login systems don’t lock out people with disabilities.

This past week, the W3C finally published a new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as its official recommendation. This new version, WCAG 2.2, has been a long time coming.

What is the purpose of a website link? The utilitarian answer is that it’s what you click on to get from one page (or place) to another. But most of us don’t just automatically click on all the links we see. We rely on the link itself to give us more information about what we will see and receive if we choose to click on the link. This is why generic or ambiguous link text like Learn more or Click here can impact your site’s performance, usability and accessibility.

WCAG version 2.2 is coming later this year. What does your organization need to do to prepare?

When you work in digital accessibility, you hear a lot of things from customers, designers, developers, and agencies that just aren’t correct. Most are genuine misconceptions, but that doesn’t mean they’re harmless. At best, organizations can end up overspending on accessibility. But they also let organizations psych themselves out of pursuing greater accessibility out of fear that it will be too expensive or too difficult. And at worst, orgs might think they are accessibility conformant but are actually increasing their legal risk while missing out on the business benefits of digital accessibility.