Web Accessibility Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where member organizations work together to develop web standards.
Tim Berners-Lee co-invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and founded the W3C organization. The W3C mission is to lead the web to its full potential, and
the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops a set of guidelines that are internationally recognized as the standard for web accessibility.

The Web Accessibility Standards

The Web Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG) Success Criteria are organized around four principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robustable). Under each of the principles are guidelines, and the Success Criteria help to address these principles for people with disabilities. One of the key objectives of the guidelines is to ensure that content is directly accessible to as many people as possible, and capable of being re-presented in different forms to match different people’s sensory, physical and cognitive abilities. Under each guideline are criteria that describe specifically what must be achieved in order to conform to WCAG at
three levels of conformance: A, AA, AAA.

Web Accessibility Principles

The Web Accessibility Survey

Canada scores a 64 overall out of 100, according to the World Accessibility Map. The Accessibility World Map is a free resource that compares the accessibility of websites around the world. By presenting worldwide accessibility levels in an easy-to-understand, accessible, and interactive dashboard, this website aims to empower visitors to advocate for a more accessible online world.
Countries and industries are scored on a scale of one to 100. The higher the score, the more accessible the site.

GOV.UK: Digital inclusion and accessibility in society Report, December 2021 We have published a report on what we have found from the last 2 years of monitoring public sector websites and mobile apps for accessibility.

Digital Journal: Leading websites rated for accessibility for the visually impaired, Dr. Tim Sandle, November 2021
newly compiled data shows that over 40 percent of the most popular websites are inaccessible for users with visual impairments According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people are estimated to have some form of visual impairment. Considering nearly 60 percent of the global population are active internet users, website accessibility is therefore fundamental to ensuring all these net surfers can browse, shop, and watch content online. The research comes from ToolTester, who analyzed over 150 of the most popular websites across the globe to assess their accessibility for those with disabilities.

WebAIM: The WebAIM Million – An annual accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages
Each year, since 2019, WebAIM conducted an accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 web sites, and over 100,000 additional interior site pages. The evaluation was conducted using the WAVE stand-alone API (with additional tools to collect site technology and sector parameters). The results provide an overview of and insight into the current state of web accessibility for individuals with disabilities and trends over time. While this research focuses only on automatically detectable issues, the results paint a rather dismal picture of the current state of web accessibility for individuals with disabilities. Significant work remains to be done to make the web accessible to everyone. WebAIM hopes that this report will help influence improved accessibility.