WCAG-EM 2.0 lets you report on accessibility of more than just websites

WCAG-EM describes a process for checking if a large website conforms to WCAG. More than 10 years after it first came out, WCAG-EM 2.0 was just published as a draft. We'd like your feedback!

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group at the W3C—who work on WCAG, among other deliverables—published this “Group Note Draft” today. It's the last step before the document can become a Note, pending Working Group decision to do so (possibly later this year).

A process for reporting

WCAG-EM is the most commonly used accessibility reporting methodology in The Netherlands. The Dutch government runs a dashboard that collects conformance reports of thousands of government websites and apps, of which almost all were created by following WCAG-EM. It's used less outside The Netherlands, but my hope is that will change and others find it useful.

WCAG-EM will not tell you how to make a website accessible, it gives you a consistent process to check. WCAG has the requirements, WCAG-EM has steps to report on them. With its sampling process, it helps reliably and consistently report on websites that are too big to evaluate page by page.

If your organisation has many websites, getting your accessibility vendors to use the same methodology could make it easier to understand, compare, and monitor results.

2.0: more than websites

Version 1.0 of WCAG-EM was edited by accessibility veterans Shadi Abou-Zahra and Eric Velleman.

For 2.0, editorship was taken over by myself, Steve Faulkner and Jeroen Hulscher. We did a number of smaller changes: worked on readability and clarity, updating references to related standards and guidance, and adding new graphics and examples.

The most exciting change: we updated terminology so that WCAG-EM can now be applied to apps and other digital products too. This made sense, as regulators have long required apps and other products to be accessible, and WCAG 3 is making a similar shift to broader applicability.

To make this work, we made some changes:

• instead of websites, evaluations now concern digital products
• a “sample of web pages” is now a set of samples, we heard from evaluators we talked to that they use the word "sample” as shortcut for web page / view / screen
• a sample can be a web page or any other type of view (app screen, steps in a kiosk etc)

The process itself is mostly the same, and when doing an evaluation you would follow roughly the same steps.

Let us know what you think

We published WCAG-EM 2 as a draft note to seek wide input on the current shape of the document. If you evaluate websites or other digital products for accessibility, we'd love to hear what you think.