Certification or conformance: making a successful commitment to WCAG 2.0

The need for accessible websites is well recognized and the accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) provide an important benchmark standard for measuring progress of eGoverment and commercial websites. This study was commissioned by ANEC and aimed to examine the effects of voluntary and third party certification schemes on actual conformance with web accessibility standards. A sample of 100 websites claiming voluntary or certified conformance to accessibility standards were selected from 5 European countries. In a combination of automatic tests and manual inspection it was found that simple measures of numbers of passes to WCAG 2.0 level A were highly disappointing. Closer inspection of the results revealed that a limited number of criteria at level A accounted for more than half the failures. These individual failures at level A tend to mask the commitment made by development teams to meet the needs of disabled users. Clearer processes are needed to identify and resolve these persistent barriers in order to support web development and achieve better and more consistent conformance to accessibility guidelines.