The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are an important set of guidelines and techniques that outline important areas to pay particular attention to when developing accessible websites. By following the guidelines and successfully passing their various checkpoints or success criteria, you will have gone a long way towards creating more accessible websites.

In this book I have chosen not to give you guidance on 'how to comply with WCAG', rather I have distilled my experience and covered many of the important areas, which when followed will serve the need of many of your users. You may also, happily, comply with many parts of the WCAG guidelines.

There are two sets of WCAG guidelines (version 1.0 and version 2.0). WCAG version 2.0 is still in draft. However, you could start reading version 1.0, but do keep an eye on the newer version which I have outlined next. The new guidelines are a major improvement and a promising evolution. They are not perfect but hey, evolution is...