WCAG by principle

Here are all the guidelines as grouped by the POUR principle.

To be clear, accessibility is not a checklist or a tool, and doing everything exacly as documented here will not always guarantee an accessible, or compliant site. It's important to note that how you deliver accessibility is unique and completely dependant on your particular site content, and users.

Ensuring everyone can perceive content

The internet is immersive and interactive, but its nothing if people can’t actually perceive any of that fun content. More importantly, being able to perceive products and software used for employment gives people with disabilities opportunities to provide for themselves and live independently lives. The journey through the pour principles starts with being able to perceive content.

Ensuring everyone can interact with content

The beauty of the web is how interactive and immersive it is. I am always amazed, and grateful, at how the web started off as just static content to now driving complex functionality with full-blow applications in the browser. But everyone needs to be able to navigate and interact with content.

Ensuring everyone can understand content

It doesn't matter how visually appealing your product or site is, it doesn't matter what technology you used, and it doesn't even matter if you technically and systematically satisfied the bare minimum requirements of other guidelines. Straight up, if people cannot understand how to use your site, or the information it provides, then it's really just taking up space and resources. So let's talk about some basic guidelines to ensure that everyone can understand your content.

Ensuring content is robust

Your content should be robust enough that it can be used by current and future technologies. Your content needs to be compatible with a variety of browsers and assistive technologies. This is absolutely important in order to make sure that assistive technologies can present content reliably and support different methods of operating. When content is robust, it doesn't matter what type of assistive technology is being used, it could be a screen reader, a refreshable braille display, or voice dictation, it should all work.