Web Accessibility Principles Flashcards
What is the “perceivability” principle of web accessibility?
Perceivability is about making the output of web content available through multiple sensory modalities. You have to be able to perceive web content through at least one of your biological senses for it to be accessible at all.
What is the “operability” principle of web accessibility?
Operability is about making the input methods of web content functionally available to a wide range of input devices, including: mouse or touchpad, keyboard, touchscreen, voice recognition software, or other specialized input devices (most of which emulate the keyboard or mouse).
What is the “understandability” principle of web accessibility?
Understandability is about making content and interfaces that people can comprehend.
What is the “robustness” principle of web accessibility?
Robustness is about ensuring compatibility with a broad range of user agents, including assistive technologies.
Why does perceivability matter?
If you can’t perceive web content, it may as well not exist.
If you can’t see, all types of visual information—such as images, animations, colors, backgrounds, visual placement and layout—are completely useless, unless a digital text alternative is provided so that screen readers can convert that text into either sound or Braille. The same is true in varying degrees for people with low vision or color-blindness.
If you can’t hear, audio content is completely unusable, and multimedia content—such as videos with sound—are much less useful than they could be, unless a text alternative is provided, in either caption or transcript format.
Why is digital text the universal format?
Digital text solves the perceivability problem for people who are blind, for people who are deaf, and for people who are both blind and deaf. Digital text is the most universally accessible format available, because it can be converted into all of the other useful sensory formats. That’s something to make note of, and to keep in mind as you learn more about web accessibility.
How do you make dynamic content perceivable?
You can also make dynamic interactions accessible using digital text. You can use ARIA to announce when a tab is “expanded” or “collapsed”. You can use an ARIA live region to announce new content as it is inserted into the DOM.
Yes, you do need to announce these kinds of things. Blind users won’t know when tabs expand or collapse unless this change of state is announced to them. If new content is injected into a page—such as an error message or a confirmation message—blind users need to hear this new information. ARIA live regions can be used for this purpose, or you can move the browser’s focus to those areas to force screen readers to read them.
What does ARIA stand for?
Accessible Rich Internet Applications
What does POUR stand for?
Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust.
Which principle of web accessibility focuses on presenting information that can be accessed through multiple biological senses?
Perceivable.
Ensuring that interaction with web content does not depend on using specific input devices is an application of which principle?
Operable.
Alerting users to session timeouts utilizes which principle?
Operable.
True or False: Making sure that web content is robust means making sure that content is written in a manner that is easy to comprehend.
False.
Ensuring that navigation features like a menu are consistent across the entire website is an example of which web accessibility principle?
Understandable.
A popup warning on a web site that states to all users, “Your session is about to expire. Would you like to continue?” is an example of which web accessibility principle?
Perceivable.
