WCAG 2.2, Web Content Accessibility Standards, and You
Firmly rooted goalposts are a necessary condition for a fair playing field—Calvinball is only fun to play if you happen to be Calvin. When it comes
to making software accessible so all users have a level playing field for work or study, it’s equally necessary for companies and developers to
all be working toward an agreed standard.
Fortunately, that is largely the case now in the Western world. It wasn’t always, though. For example, in 2007, my state of Illinois passed its
own digital accessibility law, the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA), which was much more demanding than federal guidelines set by Section 508. It created a scramble to upgrade government and public education IT systems to a standard that most vendors were completely unprepared to meet.
Instead of a patchwork of accessibility standards for California, Illinois, Europe, and everywhere else, the current standard is set by a broad cross-section of experts from the industry and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
WCAG benefits vendors by setting uniform endzones to strategize toward and also benefits legislatures, as they no longer need to summon
experts but periodically need to update their existing accessibility laws to conform to the latest version of WCAG. The latest version of WCAG is 2.2 and was officially adopted on Oct. 5 after 3 years of publicly reviewable version-controlled revisions. Fortunately, WCAG 2.2 is entirely backward-compatible with WCAG 2.1, and the changes are very few, especially compared to the substantial changes necessitated by the enormous amount of lessons learned in internet technology between earlier versions adopted in 2008 (coinciding with the initial release of HTML5 and amid peak Myspace) and 2018 (with Web 3.0 usability challenges, such as real-time interactively updating websites, being the norm).
To get to WCAG 2.2 conformance, there are two changed guidelines that demand special attention. The first is one that video platforms often have a hard time not tripping over: three additional success criteria standards for the navigable operation of websites. The first two criteria require that any user interface component be visible to the user and anyone watching the screen; the third sets clear size and contrast standards for indicating focus. This is of concern for educational video platforms, since video players in course webpages are almost always embedded via confining iFrames. For example, the platform may make it possible for teachers to add annotations to their video that are implemented using an HTML element on top of the video. If a teacher adds an annotation near the bottom of the video screen and a user tabs onto an element that opens a dialog over the video, that dialog must not be obscured by the annotation element while the dialog has keyboard focus. This would be easy to miss in testing, since the annotation isn’t part of the video player as designed, but something that the teacher can add and position as they choose. The same goes for in-video quiz interfaces and other pop-ons.
The second changed guideline is 2.5, Input Modalities, which likely requires an update to your video player. Success Criterion 2.5.7 states that any element that can be repositioned using a drag-and-drop mechanism must also\ have a means of repositioning the element that only requires single clicks. Closed captions are often displayed in a container element on top of the video screen, and many players allow the user to reposition the captions by dragging and dropping them. This is very useful for educational videos that may consistently show slides in which there’s important text at the bottom, where the captions appear by default, but perhaps also decorative imagery at the top.
A user who doesn’t use a mouse or lacks the dexterity to hold down the mouse button needs to be able to reposition the captions as well—
for example, by tabbing onto a labeled control button in the caption container and pressing Enter. That would create a new tab index of labeled drop zones where the caption container could be repositioned to the original location to cancel the reposition interface.
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