A working handbook
Making the Web Understandable, One WCAG Criterion at a Time
This is a working handbook that walks through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) one success criterion at a time: how to recognize when it's violated, which group of people it protects, and how to fix it in practice.
For the last 5 years, my job has been fixing other people's accessibility mistakes — auditing sites and adapting them so they actually work for a wider range of visitors. This is where I'm writing that experience down: partly as a personal reference, partly as something public I can point people to. If you spot a mistake or have a question about any of it, get in touch — I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Why bother with accessibility?
Avoiding legal risk
Accessibility lawsuits and complaints are increasingly common, and an inaccessible site is an easy target. Following WCAG is the most direct way to reduce that exposure.
Reaching more people
Roughly 1 in 8 people worldwide lives with a temporary or permanent disability that affects how they use the web. Accessible design means your work actually reaches them, instead of quietly locking them out.
Because it's the right thing to do
More than any business case, this is the real reason: technology is meant to extend what people can do, and it's simply a good, kind thing to make sure it extends to everyone.
What's here
Each entry in the WCAG criteria collection covers one success criterion, kept deliberately short: what it protects against, who it affects, how to spot it, and how to fix it. That's not a WCAG success criterion itself — it follows W3C's supplemental guidance for cognitive and learning disabilities, which recommends short, clearly-separated chunks of content over long unbroken pages.
Questions or corrections?
If something here is wrong, unclear, or missing, I'd rather hear about it than have it sit quietly wrong. Reach me at mario@faveo.hr.