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It can be tempting to get really fancy with our presentation of content, but that should never conflict with any users ability to understand what we’re trying to convey.
Let's talk about with WCAG Principle 3,
Understandable.
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The first step to making our web content
understandable is making it readable.
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At its most basic level,
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this means making the default
language of our content identifiable.
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This is a low hanging fruit.
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We can accomplish it by including
the lang attribute in our HTML element.
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A predictable web page doesn't do things
that the user hasn't asked it to do.
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Changing focus or
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the settings of the UI component
shouldn't trigger a change of context.
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What's a change of context you ask?
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This is a great time to point out that the
WCAG working group is pretty self-aware.
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They know they've used terms
that might not be familiar or
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make sense to regular
people in this context.
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Knowing that, they've created a glossary.
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You can click on many of the terms you'll
find throughout the guidelines to see
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an explanation.
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In this case,
we'll click on change of context.
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This is great because not only
does it expand on the term itself,
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but it gives us an example.
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So now we now that success
criteria 3.2.1 and
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3.2.2 are saying we should never
trigger things like pop-up windows or
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switch to a different page just because
an element has received focus or
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UI settings have changed.
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Taking the time to discover the meaning of
terms you don't understand will make it
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much easier to gauge the excessive
ability of your work in a long run.
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The last guideline governed by the
understandable principle has to do with
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input elements.
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Whatever the user needs to do to fill
out our forms should be crystal clear.
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Provide sufficient instructions and
label all of your input elements.
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Any error we detect should be communicated
to the user so that they can fix it.
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Have you ever filled out a form and
had your input rejected but
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couldn't tell what was wrong?
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This kind of issue could keep a new user
from signing up for your service, or
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a customer from buying your product.
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