WCAG Checklist: What It Is, How it Works, and How to Use It

What is a WCAG checklist? A WCAG checklist sounds like it should be pretty straightforward until you're staring at 78 success criteria and realize you have no idea where to start. That's what we'll do in this video: explain what a WCAG checklist is, how it’s organized, and how to use it to boost accessibility and meet compliance standards. First, to understand what a WCAG checklist is, you need to know what WCAG is.

WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and is a set of guidelines or criteria for making online content accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG guidelines were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and are considered an international standard for accessibility. A WCAG checklist is a structured list of WCAG success criteria used to evaluate whether your website or digital content meets accessibility requirements. You can use it to audit your content and ensure you're staying compliant with key accessibility laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508, and EN 301 549. This helps you avoid the legal exposure and real barriers for disabled users that come from inaccessible content.

WCAG guidelines organize all success criteria into four core principles. Understanding those is the fastest way to help make sense of a WCAG checklist. Known as the Pour Principles, these principles require that content be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Perceivable means content must be presented in ways users can detect. It can't be invisible to any of the senses. Operable means users can navigate and interact with content using more than just a mouse, a key functionality for users with disabilities. Understandable means content behaves in a predictable, readable way. Finally, robust means your content works reliably across various devices, including assistive technologies.

Each of these principles is then further organized into three conformance levels. Level A is the most basic level. Level AA is the standard level of accessibility. Level AAA is the highest level of accessibility and removes most, if not all, accessibility barriers. Most organizations aim for level AA compliance as it is enforced by several accessibility laws, including the ADA.

So what does a WCAG checklist actually look like? A WCAG checklist organizes success criteria into conformance levels, provides a brief explanation for each, and asks a simple question: Does your content meet the success criterion? Think of it like a line-by-line audit of your site to determine whether it meets WCAG accessibility standards. If you want to try a WCAG checklist for yourself, check AudioEye’s comprehensive WCAG checklist using the link below.