Today we’re excited to share a brand-new free resource with the Stark community: The WCAG explained – Over 100 articles explaining every WCAG 2.2 criteria in simple language for everyone to understand.

The WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are essential for accessibility, ensuring everyone can use digital products easily. It’s literally the global standard and it’s written painstakingly by a group of volunteers.

However, the complex scenarios and dense language make them very hard to understand for newcomers. We get it. Almost everyone who is an accessibility expert today has been where you are. We’re all about lowering barriers here at Stark so we went ahead and summarized literally all of it for you in simpler terms.

What we did

Stark has written summaries and guides for each and every WCAG 2.2 principle, guideline, and criterion (over 100 pages!). This effort aims to demystify WCAG, making it easier for everyone to work towards more accessible designs. To verify that we actually did move the needle, we ran some user tests.

First, we had the participants do research on a WCAG criterion. Then, we had them look at the same criterion summarized by us. We found that it was very hard to grapple with the WCAG quickly, while our summaries were immediately clear.

Let’s be honest, the WCAG is necessary and beautiful for what it is. That's why you’ll find links to the original WCAG criterion, the official Understanding WCAG documentation, and the official WCAG How To Implement documentation at the bottom of every criterion. We hope that our summaries and simple examples act as an entry point into deep accessibility knowledge.

Using Stark’s summaries effectively

Run into a WCAG criterion you don’t understand? Need to start something and know you struggle to understand the WCAG quickly? Start with one of our summaries and grow from there. Still super confused? That’s totally okay. We have a community full of people, including ourselves, ready to jump in and answer any and every question you may have. Ask away!

What Stark’s summaries aren’t

It’s important to note that while our summaries are a great starting point, they don’t replace the full WCAG documentation. They’re meant to guide and inform, not serve as the only resource. They provide a solid foundation, but they’re just the beginning. We’re not dropping code snippets in there yet.

We hope that The WCAG Explained makes tackling WCAG criteria much more straightforward with concise summaries. We’re also excited to see how this knowledge improves your products. Dive into the summaries, dig deeper when you feel like you’re getting it, and start applying your knowledge right away. Let’s do this.

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Have any questions about using the WCAG explained? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@getstark.co, or join the conversations in our Stark Slack Community, on LinkedIn, or on Twitter.