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What Are Best Practices in Web Accessibility?

WCAG doesn't cover all possible accessibility issues and solutions. While it is the best place to start to make your website compliant, it's not the whole picture when it comes to accessibility.

There is a substantial body of accessibility advice and techniques that are not explicitly referenced within any success criteria. These techniques are called "accessibility best practices." 

The WCAG serves as a baseline for accessibility, outlining essential compliance requirements. Best practices are recommended strategies to take accessibility to the next level, sometimes utilizing advanced techniques to elevate accessibility beyond required compliance.

Why Are Best Practices Separate From WCAG?

  1. The WCAG success criteria undergo extensive review and testing before finalization, ensuring their stability but potentially limiting their ability to keep pace with the ideas and technologies that affect web accessibility.
  2. The WCAG success criteria must be objectively measurable to guarantee accessibility. While potentially beneficial, some techniques may not meet this requirement and are, therefore, outside the success criteria.

Even though most best practices do not make it into the success criteria, WCAG offers advisory techniques as supplementary guidance to the normative success criteria. Advisory techniques are generally considered best practice advice, even though they are not mandatory "success criteria."

What Best Practices Does DubBot Check?

The DubBot app uses the List of Axe HTML 4.8 rules - Best Practices Rules from Deque Systems to execute Best Practices checks. Here’s a sample of some of those checks:

  • skip-link: Ensure all skip links have a focusable target
  • tabindex: Ensures tabindex attribute values are not greater than 0
  • aria-text: Ensures role="text" is used on elements with no focusable descendants
  • heading-order: Ensures the order of headings is semantically correct

The image below is an example of a Detailed Page View in DubBot that flags a heading order as best practice.

An in-page report in the DubBot app highlighting an Best Practices issue of heading levels should only increase by one. The offending header is highlighted in an orange box.

Note. In the DubBot app, Best Practice checks do NOT affect the Overall Site Score.

While working to ensure your website and other digital products meet the legally enforceable standards of the WCAG, remember also to implement best practices to elevate your website to a more accessible and truly inclusive digital experience.

Resources

Maggie Vaughan, CPACC
Content Marketing Practitioner
DubBot