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WCAG, Section 508, WAI-ARIA

There are several standards, policies and principles that govern how accessible applications and components are created. This article offers an overview of them. For a list of the accessibility compliance levels support provided by the Telerik UI for Blazor components see the Telerik UI for Blazor Accessibility Compliance article.

In this article you will find information on the general topics of accessibility:

Standards and Policies

Accessible websites and applications normally comply with some or all of the following standards:

Section 508

Since 1998, Section 508 is part of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 508 represents a set of accessibility standards which were defined by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and which initially applied to Federal agencies only with the aim to ensure that their electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.

In 2017, Section 508 was reorganized to meet and reflect recent communication technology innovations and nowadays the Section 508 guidelines impact not only all U.S. Federal agencies, but also affect any company which does business with a Federal agency. Such companies include vendors, private contractors, financial industry, healthcare and legal organizations, and partners of those agencies which operate in the United States or abroad.

For more information, refer to:

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) define recommendations for making web content accessible to people with physical and cognitive disabilities. WCAG defines accessibility principles with their respective success criteria. Depending on the implemented success criteria by a web application, the WCAG provide the A, AA, and AAA levels of accessibility conformance.

For more information, refer to:

Technical Specifications

WAI-ARIA

WAI-ARIA is a set of technical specifications which were developed by the W3C and which provide the semantics for the assistive technologies to access and interpret web content and web applications. The WAI-ARIA recommendations (standards) divide the semantics into roles and into states and properties which those roles support. For example, a checkbox role supports the aria-checked state which indicates whether a checkbox, radio button, or a similar UI element is checked.

The WAI-ARIA framework targets web developers who create web applications by using AJAX, scripting, and other rich application techniques.

For more information, refer to:

Keyboard Navigation

By default, users can only navigate to links, buttons, and form controls with a keyboard. The navigation order in which interactive items receive keyboard focus has to be logical and intuitive. Generally, keyboard navigation logic needs to follow the visual horizontal and vertical flow of the page. For example, left to right and top to bottom, header first followed by the main and then the page navigation.

Keyboard accessibility is a category under the WCAG Operable principle.

In WCAG 2.2, the keyboard accessible category provides the following success criteria:

See the Keyboard Support in Telerik UI for Blazor article for more details on using the Telerik components with the keyboard.

The described level of compliance in the table below is achievable with the Ocean Blue Sass Swatch and the Default Ocean Blue A11Y.

Accessibility Compliance Components Table

The following table lists the Section 508 and WCAG 2 compliance levels of support for the Blazor UI components.

Component 508 WCAG 2.2 Accessibility Example Accessibility Documentation
AutoComplete Yes AA Demo Documentation
Barcodes No n/a n/a n/a
Breadcrumb Yes AAA Demo Documentation
Button Yes AAA Demo Documentation
ButtonGroup Yes AAA Demo Documentation
Calendar Yes AAA Demo Documentation
Card No n/a n/a n/a
Carousel Yes AA Demo Documentation
Charts Yes AA Demo Documentation
CheckBox Yes AA n/a Documentation
ChunkProgressBar Yes AA n/a Documentation
ColorGradient Yes AA Demo Documentation
ColorPalette Yes AA Demo Documentation
ColorPicker Yes AA n/a Documentation
ComboBox Yes AA Demo Documentation
Context Menu Yes AA Demo Documentation
Date Input Yes AA Demo Documentation
Date Picker Yes AA Demo Documentation
DateRange Picker Yes AA Demo Documentation
DateTime Picker Yes AA Demo Documentation
Dialog Yes AA n/a Documentation
Drawer Yes AA Demo Documentation
DropDownList Yes AA Demo Documentation
Editor Yes AA Demo Documentation
FileManager No n/a n/a n/a
FileSelect No n/a n/a n/a
Filter Yes AA Demo Documentation
FlatColorPicker Yes AA n/a Documentation
FloatingLabel No n/a n/a n/a
Form No n/a n/a n/a
Gantt Yes AA n/a Documentation
Gauges No n/a n/a n/a
Grid Yes AA Demo Documentation
Grid Layout No n/a n/a n/a
ListView Yes AAA Demo Documentation
Loader No n/a n/a n/a
LoaderContainer No n/a n/a n/a
Map No n/a n/a n/a
MaskedTextbox Yes AA n/a Documentation
MediaQuery No n/a n/a n/a
Menu Yes AA Demo Documentation
MultiColumnComboBox No n/a n/a n/a
MultiSelect Yes AA Demo Documentation
Notification Yes AA n/a Documentation
NumericTextbox Yes AA Demo Documentation
Pager Yes AA Demo Documentation
PanelBar No n/a n/a n/a
PDF Viewer No n/a n/a n/a
ProgressBar Yes AA n/a Documentation
RadioGroup Yes AA Demo Documentation
Range Slider Yes AA Demo Documentation
Scheduler Yes AA Demo Documentation
Signature Yes AA n/a Documentation
Skeleton No n/a n/a n/a
Slider Yes AA Demo Documentation
SplitButton Yes AA Demo Documentation
Splitter Yes AA Demo Documentation
Stack Layout No n/a n/a n/a
Stepper Yes AA Demo Documentation
Stock Chart No n/a n/a n/a
Switch Yes AA Demo Documentation
TabStrip Yes AA Demo Documentation
TextArea Yes AAA n/a Documentation
TextBox Yes AA n/a Documentation
TileLayout Yes AAA n/a Documentation
TimePicker Yes AA Demo Documentation
ToggleButton Yes AA Demo Documentation
ToolBar Yes AA Demo Documentation
Tooltip Yes AA n/a Documentation
TreeList No n/a n/a n/a
TreeView Yes AA Demo Documentation
Upload No n/a n/a n/a
Window Yes AA Demo Documentation
Wizard Yes AA Demo Documentation

See Also

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