UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · Accessibility and Inclusive Design
WCAG and the POUR Principles
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide the internationally recognized standard most accessibility laws actually reference, and understanding its underlying structure makes the specific, detailed requirements considerably easier to reason about than treating them as an arbitrary checklist.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, reached its current version, WCAG 2.2, as an official recommendation in October 2023, organizing 86 specific, testable success criteria into three conformance levels, A (the minimum), AA (the level most accessibility laws actually reference), and AAA (the most stringent, rarely required across an entire product) [6].
- WCAG 2.2, the current version since October 2023, organizes 86 success criteria into three levels: A (minimum), AA (what most laws reference), and AAA (most stringent, rarely required).
- The four POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) give a conceptual structure for reasoning about new requirements, rather than memorizing each criterion in isolation.
- Level AA is the practical target most products should aim for, since it's what most current accessibility legislation, including the ADA, actually references.
- WCAG conformance is assessed page by page, not as a blanket product-wide claim, meaning auditing must genuinely cover every distinct page or flow, not a convenient sample.