ARIA APG

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative has been leading the way to a more accessible and equitable web for years. The ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) is an essential resource to help web developers keep the web accessible, and we were excited to be a part of a redesign to make the resource itself easier to navigate and more accessible.

The old ARIA AGP was a bit tricky for folks to navigate, so in coordination with W3C’s APG Task Force and Education and Outreach Working Group we drastically redesigned the resource. Since its introduction in 2014 APG has been published as a W3C technical note, a resource intended to be read primarily as a single text-based document.

Our redesign marks a significant change in format to a browsable, multi-page website with site-wide navigation and a new interface for browsing the deep catalog of content. This update included a swath of usability improvements designed to make it easier to find, navigate, and read the full extent of APG guidance. In addition, the conversion to a website allowed us to relocate APG to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

This new home will allow more developers to discover APG and contextualize its guidance as part of a larger ecosystem of resources, tools, and instructional materials. Perhaps most importantly, the redesign motivated a renewed focus on guidance for newcomers. The new APG includes a homepage which showcases the different resources within and provides a friendlier face for newcomers. We also added a readme which gives people a concrete place to start their journey as they browse the full website.