Alongside me on the screen is a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet contains my WCAG 2.1 AA checklist. So just in and of itself, the spreadsheet provides value because it’s dynamic in that you can sort through the different columns and adjust the display in how you would like.
But I’ve added a few additional columns which are going to be extremely helpful as you work through the different guidelines. One column is the action column. This column tells you whether or not you’re likely going to need to take action for the given success criterion. One thing that many people don’t know is that for most of the success criteria, you probably don’t need to do anything because either they’re inapplicable to you, or your website doesn’t. For example, your website might not have live closed captioning, and if it doesn’t, then you just need to be aware of that when you do have a presentation where there are live presenters. But that likely is inapplicable to you, so you don’t need to take action on that.
There are some success criteria which you’re likely already meeting, you’re conformant with, and you just need to review to make sure that is the case. I’ve gone through each success criterion and told you what you likely need to take action on and you likely don’t. This is a way to not only sort through what you need to do, but also prioritize the actions and the next steps that you take.
There’s also a column for completed. This is a way that you can easily identify which success criterion you’ve already taken care of. There is also a column for role, so you can sort through this and know, okay, here are the different people that need to be responsible for these respective success criteria. It could be your content editor, it might be your designer, it might be your developer. This column gives you the ability to sort through and assign responsibility for each one, because the different success criteria, it’s not just one person that is going through everything. You are very likely going to have multiple people working on conformance. And when you do, you will want to know which people should be working on each success criterion.
This spreadsheet is available in my WCAG course. I think this spreadsheet alone is worth the price of the course. But then there’s also the course, which builds upon my checklist and guide, and it has video explanations in plain English, really for beginners, so that everyone can understand what each success criterion is asking for. Some of the success criteria have code examples to help guide you through and understand what each success criterion, really the implementation or the finding of issues to see where you might have an issue because your code isn’t technically correct.
This course is really what you need to have if you want to understand the web content accessibility guidelines. It’s beginner-friendly, in plain English, and there’s the spreadsheet checklist. I’ve incorporated what you need to understand and take action to become more conformance with whatever web asset you have, whether it’s a website or not. This spreadsheet is really going to help.
