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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.
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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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