From the end user perspective, accessibility is always simple. Shades of accessibility aside for whoever is attempting to interact with the desired functionality, either it works as they expect, or it does not. When it doesn't, it always gets bounced back to developers, and officially becomes Somebody Else's Problem.
As a developer, it's taken me many years to figure out that there are several very important layers to accessibility for web technologies, and how to recognize them during the process of development. It took my involvement with the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group to really cement these concepts into place for me, and to put things into perspective. It really should not have to be this difficult though, not for me, or anybody else. This is especially true for developers, upon whose proverbial head all accessibility issues eventually land.
So my goal with writing this, is to provide a single comprehensive explanation of what these layers of accessibility are, and how developers can recognize them during the process of development, so that accessible web technologies will be easier to diagnose and build in the future.
This also describes the methodology that I use personally to build and test new web technologies. It's the culmination of many years of study.
(Written in collaboration with members of the W3C PFWG, including Richard Schwerdtfeger, T.V Raman, and Mark Sadecki)
Distributed under the terms of the Open Source Initiative OSI - MIT License.
Developed and maintained by: Bryan Garaventa
The ARIA Role Conformance Matrices: https://github.com/accdc/aria-matrices
AccDC API Standalone: https://github.com/accdc/accdc For jQuery: https://github.com/accdc/accdc-jquery For Dojo: https://github.com/accdc/accdc-dojo For MooTools: https://github.com/accdc/accdc-mootools
AccDC Bootstrap Standalone: https://github.com/accdc/bootstrap For jQuery: https://github.com/accdc/bootstrap-jquery For Dojo: https://github.com/accdc/bootstrap-dojo For MooTools: https://github.com/accdc/bootstrap-mootools
AccDC Technical Style Guide and Coding Arena For AccDC Standalone and jQuery: https://github.com/accdc/tsg For Dojo: https://github.com/accdc/tsg-dojo For MooTools: https://github.com/accdc/tsg-mootools