RE: WCAG 2.1 questions

Hi Pierre,

The list of WCAG 2.1 success criteria is at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

It is a huge page full of unfamiliar terminology, so it will take a very long time to read and even longer to understand. The success criteria are classified as level A, AA or AAA depending on their importance, with level A being the most important. Most organisations aim to meet level A and AA. Even then, there are 50 success criteria you need to understand.

On the page mentioned above, each success criterion links to a page that provides deeper explanation. That page links to more pages describing success and failure techniques. In total there are more than 500 pages.

WCAG 2.1 is not a law, so there is no deadline for conformance. Most countries have disability discrimination laws, but most do not specify any technical requirements. They only care if discrimination occurred, not whether you took technical measures to prevent it happening (of course this is a simplification of laws that can be quite complex).

Public sector website laws
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In the UK and European Union, we do have laws that require conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA. They started life as the EU Accessibility Directive, which each EU country has now transposed into their own law. In the UK we did this before leaving the EU, and the law is called The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (which we refer to as the PSBAR).

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/952/made

The PSBAR contains several deadlines, one of which is today. From today, all public sector websites must be conformant with WCAG 2.1 AA regardless of when they were published, although there are a variety of exceptions for certain content types. Mobile apps must meet the standard by 23 September 2021.

Although the EU Accessibility Directive would not apply directly to your organisation, it may apply indirectly if you supply services to public sector organisations.

Private sector website laws
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The EU Accessibility Act is a very similar law that will apply to private sector organisations, although it will not come into force for at least another 3 years. Since the UK has left the EU it will not apply here, although I would not be surprised if we bring in a similar law because we have historically taken accessibility far more seriously than other EU countries.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Pierre CHMIELEWSKI <pierre.chmielewski@bureauveritas.com>
Sent: 23 September 2020 14:46
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: WCAG 2.1 questions

Hi,

I'm Pierre Chmielewksi, working as a webmaster assistant at Bureau Veritas corporate department.
We heard about the WCAG 2.1 standards and wish to comply with them, but we have some questions that are unclear for us, could you help answering theses questions:


  *   What is the list of concerned by the WCAG2.1 standards?
  *   What are the deadline dates to be compliant with them for each country concerned ?

If you could reply to me as soon as you can so that we can start applying our web accessibility strategy on our websites park all over the world.

Thank you in advance,

Regards
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