This section aims to engrain accessible practices into the design process to instill and spread values in accessibility broadly across products.
Global Accessibility Standards
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are guidelines published by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to define accessibility standards for the design and development of digital platforms. Implementation of WCAG guidelines ensures that digital platforms and content are inclusive.
The guidelines are updated every few years. The current version is WCAG 2.2. With each new version, new guidelines are added. Spark builds its components with accessibility in mind. Our applications should be WCAG 2.2 AA-compliant.
Principles
WCAG is organized into four principles known as P.O.U.R.; an acronym used to describe these four principles.
Global Accessibility Standards
- Provide comparable experiences: Whether out of circumstance, choice or context, people are diverse. Ensure that interfaces provide a comparable experience regardless of where or how they interact with our products.
- Consider the situation: First-time users, established users, users at work, on a couch at home, or on the move. The situational impact can create challenging interactions, especially for those with disabilities.
- Create consistency: Use well-established patterns and familiar interfaces. Reinforce the meaning and purpose of our patterns by applying similar functionality, behavior, writing, and content presentation.
- Give control: Do not block users from controlling their browser, device, or platform. The user should customize settings such as orientation, font size, zoom, and contrast.
- Offer choice: Provide more than one way to complete any given task by allowing for choice alternatives, setting the precedent that the user controls their experience.
- Prioritize content: Unclear features and poor focus on interaction priorities can make interfaces challenging to understand and use. Prioritize levels of information, creating space for users to consume and interact with data or experiences one at a time.